by Lesley Kagen
In a tiny portion of her tiny brain she might be remembering our mother’s #1 Commandment that we’re never, under any circumstances, supposed to go over to the cemetery. If she is, we could wait a half hour or so and my sister with the terrible memory would probably forget that rule, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands this morning. Louise will be breathing down our necks soon, and I’m almost positive a murder has been committed in a neighborhood that hardly nothing goes on in without somebody finding out about it in five seconds flat and spreading it around even faster. You spit a loogie around here and before it hits the sidewalk you’ll read about it in St. Kate’s Weekly Bulletin.
One of our nosy neighbors had to have heard the ruckus going on at Holy Cross last night the same way I did and they might’ve already called the cops. I didn’t hear any sirens or see any flatfeet from the Washington St. police station stomping around the cemetery when I checked about a million times this morning out our window while I was waiting to wake up Birdie, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the cops are over there somewhere doing their jobs, the same way the snooping Finley sisters oughta be.
I don’t want to ask Birdie if the reason she’s refusing to go over to Holy Cross with me this morning is because she’s remembering that our mother who she loves so much doesn’t want us to, because if she isn’t remembering that, I would’ve blown it. I just quickly tug the brown T-shirt over her head and say, “C’mon. Don’t be a wet blanket. We got plenty of time to run over to the cemetery.” The church bells are letting me know the time, but I double-check Daddy’s watch that I keep on me at all times, and sure enough, it’s 6:45 a.m. on the dot. It takes Louise at least a half hour to get dressed and fix her hair after she’s done brushing her teeth. “No sweat.”
A person wouldn’t have to be a detective to see that my sister doesn’t go for that idea.
She starts flapping her arms like crazy and if I don’t soothe her ruffled feathers, she’ll do the next weird thing she does when she gets really riled up or very hungry. She’ll throw her head back and squawk. Louise will hear for sure. The whole neighborhood will hear for sure. This little kid has got such a big set of lungs on her that she could be an opera singer when she grows up. If she grows up. I’m not sure how long somebody with her condition lives.
“Okay, okay, simmer down, honey,” I tell her sotto voce, which means very softly in the Italians’ language. (You go to school with as many wops as I do, live four houses down from Nana Cavallo, who only listens to Sicilian funeral music on her record player, and watch as many gangster movies as me, ya pick things up.) “I really, really, really, really want ya to climb the cemetery fence this morning with me, but . . .” I have to tie on my thinking cap and come up with another idea to get Birdie to do what I need her to do. Believe me, it’s for her own good. “How about if we . . . hmmm . . . hey, I know! Instead of going all the way over to Holy Cross, how ’bout we just head down to the back porch and see if we can see from there the great-good-luck something I wanna show you that you’re really gonna love?” We might be able to catch the cops dusting gravestones for fingerprints or tripping over a fresh corpse with a dagger sticking out of its throat from the porch that overlooks the cemetery, which isn’t nearly as good as being at the scene of the crime, but better than nothin’. “Whatta ya say?” I stick my hand in my pocket and furiously rub my fingers on Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife for luck. “You in?”
Things can change minute to minute with my weird, loonatic sister, but I’m currently having very high hopes that I won’t be heading down to the back porch alone to see what I can see in the cemetery. Even though Birdie has parked herself on our bedroom carpet with that you’re-not-the-boss-of-me look on her face, I have one more trick up my sleeve that’s been working like a charm lately to get her going full speed ahead.
Our parish is full of juvenile delinquents nicknamed “greasers,” and busybody neighbors nicknamed “killjoys,” so if you’re the kinds of kids who are snoops and blackmailers who are on their own because their mother doesn’t like them very much and they don’t have a father anymore who would beat the living daylights out of anyone who dare lay a finger on his “babies,” you better be fast on your feet around here, and unfortunately, only one of the Finley sisters can make that brag.
Even though I’d gotten a heckuva shiner from Butch Seeback, the meanest and greasiest of the greasers, due to Birdie’s dawdling, I’d been having the worst time making her remember that if we suddenly found ourselves in a rough-and-tumble situation, which seems to happen to us all the time these days because of our dangerous lines of work, we had to haul our heinies away from whatever fix we were in ASAP! No ifs, ands, or buts.
I’d just about given up on getting through to her and felt doomed to spending half of my life with beefsteaks on my eyes, when the answer to my problem came out of nowhere the night Birdie and me were in the middle of playing the umpteenth game of cat’s cradle on our front porch steps a couple of weeks back.
There we were, breathing in that ripe red apple smell that’s been hanging over the neighborhood, passing the bakery string back and forth, when my sister’s most favorite song in all the world—“Rockin’ Robin”—came drifting down the block. The second she started to snap her fingers and got that irresistible smile on her face, I knew Birdie was going to take a powder, but my hands were tied. Before I could shake the string off my fingers to stop her, she hopped down the porch steps and took off like she was a rat following the Pied Piper toward where the tune was coming from, which turned out to be the Tates’ house five doors down.
When I was chasing after Birdie, my keen detecting mind couldn’t help but wonder just what in the hell stick-in-the-mud Mrs. Nancy Tate would be doing up at 10:47 p.m. listening to rock ’n’ roll music when her husband was laid up at St. Joe’s Hospital with the broken leg he got when he was playing football at the yearly St. Kate’s Men’s Club game.
At that time of night, you can usually find somebody in the neighborhood up to no good, but whatever that particular gal was doing, I was positive that it would not be blackmailable or mysterious and therefore a huge waste of my precious time. Mrs. Nancy Tate, the current treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society, who our mother is running against in the election in a few weeks, was probably up doing something boringly holy. Something like humming along to a stack of 45s while she was sewing patchwork quilts for heathen African children on her Singer machine.
So all I’d been thinking about doing when I finally caught up to Birdie was scolding her and dragging her back home, but after I caught a handful of her T-shirt in the Tates’ backyard, the poor thing was looking so eager to peek into the window the music was coming out of that I caved in. Sure, I was 100% positive that nothing would come of it, but I figured as long as we were there, what the heck. I gave my sister the shhh sign and took outta my shorts pocket the two things that I always keep on me after the streetlights come on. And once I got done wiggling down over our faces the exact same black nylon stockings that Daddy used to wear when he snuck up on us in the middle of the night, the sweaty Finley sisters crept hand in hand toward the Tates’ rumpus room window, ready, willing, and mostly able.
Because we weren’t on one of our regularly scheduled missions, but on one of Birdie’s regularly unscheduled missions, I didn’t have the chance to grab our coaster wagon that’s got the soda crate in it for my sister to stand on so she can see into our neighbors’ windows, so I ended up having to piggyback her. Once we got squared away, we peered through a crack in the curtains on the Tates’ wide-open window the music was booming out of and . . . lo and behold! Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate wasn’t humming along to Birdie’s most favorite song in all the world while she was pumping the pedal on her Singer machine the way I thought she’d be. Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate was humming along with “Rockin’ Robin” and pumping something else! She was shimmying around her wood-paneled rumpus room in a white pleated Washington High School cheerleader skirt for a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman.
His back was to me, but I knew who it was. One of his uprights was standing next to the chair he was sprawled out in, and he was holding in his hand the same drink he always orders at Lonnigan’s Bar whenever he comes into town. Vodka on the rocks + a Hoover machine = Mr. Horace Mertz.
Everything was going along peachy keen—Mrs. Tate was giving us real blackmailing eyefuls—until it got to the part in the song that my sister just goes absolutely crazy for. The part when the rockin’ robins start flapping their wings and singin’, “Go, bird, go.” I was so impressed by that old cheerleader’s splits that I forgot all about paying attention to you-know-who, and by the time that I did, Birdie was singing really loudly along with the song and I couldn’t slap my hands over her mouth the way I normally would’ve because I was using my arms to hold her up.
When it hit Mrs. Tate that she wasn’t performing a solo anymore, she dropped the red pom-poms she was using to cover up her long boobies, ripped open the curtains we were peeking through, hollered something at us that should get her kicked out of the Legion of Decency, and then you know what that half-naked rah-rah gal had the gall to do? She sicced her wiener dog on the Finley sisters! Slid Oscar straight through the rumpus room window!
Of course, animal lover Birdie, who was still wailing away at the top of her lungs, wanted to stay and pet the pooch instead of hightailing it out of there before we got our faces chewed off by that vicious little foot-long, so praise be to whoever is the patron saint of genius ideas for finally delivering the answer to the problem I’d been having of getting her to scram from life-threatening situations, because it worked like a charm that night and on many more snooping missions since.
Even if my partner in crime is being stubborn, scared, or overly friendly with a dangerous guard dog or greaser, all I have to do to get her moving toward a safe location is to remind my little candy worshipper that I, her one and only, the sister who loves her like no other, will reward her with a yummy Hershey’s kiss if she beats me in a race to wherever I tell her to run to. (I’m ten times faster, of course, but I let her win. She wouldn’t play along if she didn’t get something out of the deal. She’s weird and a loonatic, not some chump.)
So this morning, the start of the day that our Magic 8 Ball told me would change the Finley sisters’ entire lives, the beautiful Indian summer morning that I’m hoping to start investigating our very first murder case from the back porch of our house, I pluck my sister’s flapping hand out of the air, press it down on my shorts pocket that’s bulging with chocolate kisses, and tell her the same thing I told her in the backyard of the Tates’ house the night we needed to escape from the jaws of the wiener dog. “Race ya to the back porch! One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and—”
Sure enough, just like I was almost positive she would, the kid with a sweet tooth a mile long sings the words from her favorite song in all the world over her shoulder as she shoves past me and runs out of our bedroom door, “Go, Bird, go!”
3
LIKE A NECK TO COUNT DRACULA
After Birdie and me scramble down the stairs, skid across the green linoleum kitchen floor, and burst through the squeaky back screen door that Daddy kept meaning to oil, my sister throws her arms in the air and announces with a gloating smile, “I win!”
When I drop the first-place chocolate kiss candy into her hand that she’s waving two inches from my face, I want to, but I resist the temptation to tell her for the millionth time that she’s really gotta work on being a better winner, and I get busy doing what I came out here to do in the first place.
I lean the top part of me over our peeling porch railing, swivel my head as far as it will go to the left and the right, and what to my wandering eyes should appear but . . . a big fat zero. What the heck? Where’s the fuzz searching the cemetery for clues under the red and orange leaves, carting off a stiff through the tombstones, or holding back a pack of slobbering bloodhounds near Phantom Woods?
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
Is it even humanly possible that not one of our neighbors called the Washington St. station house to report what they heard and saw in the cemetery last night? Am I really the only one who knows about the crime that was perpetrated? Well, while I would just love to believe that, I learned my lesson. I can’t screw up again, not the way I did when I assumed it was half-in-the-bag Mr. Howard Howard ranting over there in the wee hours. So I remind myself again how Modern Detection warns gumshoes to look at all the different answers to problems that pop up during the course of an investigation, not just the ones they go crazy for right off the bat. “An investigator must remain skeptical of easy solutions,” Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower, the writer of the detecting book whose words I take very much to heart, warns in Chapter Four.
So from here on out, I, Theresa Marie “Tessie” Finley, hereby do swear that when something mysterious happens during the course of this investigation, I will examine all possibilities before I draw any conclusions and I will not let my emotions get in the way of doing my job again, either. I will ask myself the tough questions in a very coldhearted way, the ones I’d ask Daddy if he was here, or the ones I ask my Magic 8 Ball because he isn’t.
Q. Am I not seeing the police looking for footprints or searching for a body with a knife sticking out of its neck because there wasn’t a murder in the cemetery last night after all?
A. Reply hazy try again later.
Q. Could it be possible that I want to solve a crime that’d give Birdie and me a big reward or a bushel of blackmailing bucks so much that I let my imagination run away with me?
A. Cannot predict now.
Q. Could I have accidentally drifted off last night and dreamt the murder up?
A. Ask again later.
I’m so wrapped up in giving myself the third degree that I jump about a foot when Birdie taps my shoulder and asks me with a chocolaty grin, “Whatcha doin’, Tessie?”
A. Better not tell you now.
“I’m . . . I’m lookin’ around for that great-good-luck something I wanted to show ya,” I say, before I go back to bobble-heading over the porch railing, only this time in a much more desperate way.
But no matter how hard I stare at the cemetery in every direction, all I can see and hear is cemetery caretaker, grave digger, and Birdie’s and my good friend, Mr. McGinty, shouting something about funeral flowers at the hard-of-hearing widow of Mr. Peterman, whose heart attacked him a few days ago in aisle four of Melman’s Hardware when he was testing out a new toilet plunger. When the now ex-foreman over at the Feelin’ Good Cookie factory tried to pull the stuck plunger off the store’s floor, that’s when his ticker punched its time card. (No joke.)
“What kind of great-good-luck thing are you lookin’ around for?” my sister leans in close and asks me. “A four-leaf clover?”
“Nope.”
“A rabbit’s foot?”
“Uh-uh.”
“A—?”
“Corpse! Now zip it. I gotta concentrate.”
“A corpse? Oh, no.” Birdie puts her arm around my waist with a real forlorn look on her face. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this bad news,” she says like she’s Nurse Barton getting ready to explain to a patient that they got a deadly disease. “Your good timing is very off this morning, Tessie.” She reaches into my pocket and slides Daddy’s watch out so fast that I don’t barely feel her, because she has real potential as a pickpocket on account of her hands not being much bigger than the ones on the watch she’s holding up. “I think it’s around seven o’clock and Mister McGinty told us yesterday when he was digging Mister Peterman’s grave that he’s not gonna get buried until twelve o’clock today.” She taps the face of the Timex. “That’s when the hands are both straight up and they’re not.”
See who I’m working with here?
She can remember our mother’s #1 Commandment, how important good timing is, and she can recall when the heart
-attacked foreman of the Feelin’ Good factory is getting buried today, but she can’t keep in her memory any of the really important stuff, which is just about everything I need her to.
“A course I didn’t forget that Mister Peterman is getting buried at noon today,” I say crossly, because honestly, as much as I love the skin she’s in, she can get on my nerves. “I’m not looking for his old corpse. I’m looking for a really fresh one.”
“A really fresh what?”
Showing and not telling her what I heard and saw last night in the cemetery isn’t working out, so I point at Holy Cross and come clean. “I’m ninety-five percent positive a murder got committed over there last night!” When Birdie’s slightly bulging eyes go even bulgier, I go ahead and tell her the whole story, wrapping up with, “I couldn’t see him real good because it was so dark and those streetlights are always flickering in that part of the cemetery, but I could tell that our suspect was tall and skinny before he disappeared behind the Gilgood mausoleum with a limp body in his arms, which is why it definitely couldn’t have been Mister Howard Howard. He’s built like a fire hydrant and he really likes—”
“Dinah’s jelly donuts and three sugars in his Jim,” Birdie nods and says, very knowingly.
“You mean three sugars in his joe.”
“Roger that.”
“That’s why I wanted you to climb the cemetery fence this morning with me.” I am feeling as deflated as my bike tire went when I rode over that broken glass last week behind Lonnigan’s. (I know I gave it up, but I just couldn’t help myself from wanting to stare at the back door of the bar one more time and wish Daddy would walk out of it.) “I wanted to show you that murder,” I tell my sister.
“A murder?” she says. “Huh.” She scratches her head. “You wanna show it to me now?”
I sure would, but we’ve run out of time. Two streets over, the bells of St. Kate’s are clanging quarter past seven, which means Louise will be expecting breakfast on the table soon, so that’s that. But when I turn to look back at what I can see of Holy Cross one last time to make sure I didn’t miss anything, it hits me that my remorseful sister might be able to lend a hand after all.