The Mutual Admiration Society

by Lesley Kagen

  Kitten, who must really believe in that famous saying about not giving up the ship, told me outta the side of her mouth in the drugstore’s BEAUTIFICATION aisle, “Ya better start watchin’ The Bird’s back even more than ya already are, Finley.”

  “Why?” I gulped. “What’d ya hear?”

  “Gimme a dollar.” After I dug a crumpled buck out of my pocket and handed it over, my confidential informant told me really fast, because she always talks like she’s a desperado who’s got a posse closing in on her, “What I heard is that Gert Klement’s been openin’ her fat trap at Wednesday’s knitting circle. Tellin’ all the gals how they gotta say novenas for your ma ’cause it was bad enough that your old man fooled around with Suzie LaPelt, but then he had the nerve to kick the bucket without leaving her any dough, and even worse . . .” Kitten swiveled her head around the drugstore to make sure nobody was listening because she is in the information business and does not believe in handing out free samples. “I’m about to tell ya the really bad part now, Finley, so get a grip on yourself.” That’s when I ripped open the Tums and chewed three on the spot, because if Kitten Jablonski tells you something is really bad, God help me, it really is. “Ya already know that battle-ax is tryin’ to get you shipped off to St. Anne’s, but what Gert’s been spreadin’ around lately is that if your ma ever hopes to get hitched again that she should put The Bird in a home with her own kind, too, because no man wants to raise another man’s kids.”

  Along with a very smart brain and a very coordinated body, I got born with the personality of a trampoline so most of the ratty stuff people say about me bounces right off. And I already knew that Gert didn’t like Daddy—I saw the way she always stared daggers at him over her hedge and across the aisle at Mass on Sundays—so it didn’t surprise me when Kitten told me how our neighbor was cutting him down at her knitting circle for “fooling around” with Suzie LaPelt. That was so dumb, because of course “Good Time Eddie” Finley fooled around with his barmaid when they were working a shift together at Lonnigan’s Bar. He was the most fun-loving bartender in the whole neighborhood.

  But that other information Kitten told me about what Gert and her knit-one, pearl-two cronies were saying about my Birdie, that hit me hard in the breadbasket. I doubled over and went so wobbly and woozy that I had to sit down on Dalinsky’s cold tile floor with my head between my knees, because my sister getting sent to a “home” to be with her own kind isn’t far-fetched. Kids can disappear around here when they get to be too much to handle or if they’re too different. Mrs. Fontaine sent her sweet daughter, Gail Ann, who had straight black hair, ate gum offa the sidewalk, and every once in a while pranced around the neighborhood in her birthday suit when it wasn’t her birthday, to her new “home” in Mongolia. And the Jabos kid? The one whose real name was Doris but all the kids called Ducky because of those webbed fingers of hers? Her mother told everyone that she sent her daughter to “camp for the summer up north,” but when school started, Ducky still hadn’t flown south to start sixth grade with the rest of us. (No joke.)

  But according to Kitten, the “home” that Gert Klement has been yakking about sending Birdie off to with those needle wielders in the church basement is not on the other side of the world or near Green Bay, Wisconsin. I looked it up in the telephone book, then I took the #7 bus to 10073 W. Plankinton Rd. and you know what I saw when I stepped off? They can call it County Hospital all they want, but I know a loony bin when I see one, and it’d be over my dead body that I let anybody keep me from doing #1 on my most important list.

  TO-DO

  Take tender loving care of Birdie.

  Make Gert Klement think her arteries are going as hard as her heart.

  Catch whoever stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box.

  Practice your Miss America routine.

  Learn how to swim.

  Be a good dry-martini-making fiancée to Charlie.

  Do not get caught blackmailing or spying.

  Just think about making a real confession to Father Ted, before it’s too late.

  “Top o’ the morning!” Louise calls back over the hedge to Gert in the pretty soprano that she leads St. Kate’s choir with. “Thanks a bushel for keeping an eye on the girls last night.” Whenever our mother leaves the house for any reason, she asks the worst next-door neighbor in the world if she’ll keep tabs on Birdie and me, which, of course, our meddling mortal enemy is only more than happy to do. “Say good morning to Missus Klement, children.”

  Birdie follows directions, a lot nicer than me, because along with all of my sister’s other “problems,” she is an overly friendly and overly affectionate kid, a real tail-wagger.

  “I was going to check in with you when I got home, but all your lights were out,” Louise tells Gert. “Everything go hunky-dory last night?”

  Our neighbor raises one of her penciled, black-as-a-funeral eyebrows up to her bone-colored hair and slowly repeats the way she does when she wants to make a point, which is almost always, “Did . . . everything . . . go . . . hunky . . . dory . . . last . . . night?” She looks right at me and sneer-laughs. “Far from it.”

  Damnation!

  Did she see us?

  I was so keen on working on #3 on my TO-DO list that I forgot all about doing what Modern Detection calls “reconnaissance” before we took off last night to do our snooping.

  I desperately need to beat to the punch everybody else in the parish who’s been trying to catch whoever nicked the money out of the Pagan Baby collection box up at church a few weeks ago. When I get my hands on whoever perpetrated that crime, I’m not going to rat them out. I’m going to tell them that I won’t reveal their identity if they give me the money. I’m not gonna keep it. I’m gonna shove it under the bushes that grow against the side of the church, and then after Sunday Mass with so many witnesses gossiping about each other on St. Kate’s steps, I’ll wander over to where I hid it, pretend to be tying my sneaker, and pull out that stash of cash and yell, Oh, my goodness! Look what I found in these bushes! Because the way I see it, them Pagan Baby gals getting their moo-la-la back might go a long way in getting President Gert Klement off the Finley sisters’ backs, and what the heck, who knows? Returning the money to its rightful owners could even win me some brownie points from our mother and the Almighty might cut me some much-needed slack, too.

  The Mutual Admiration Society hasn’t found any clues yet, but word around the neighborhood is that Skip Abernathy might be the no-goodnik thief that everyone’s been looking for. That’s why hours before the murder happened over at the cemetery, as soon as I saw the lights go out in Gert Klement’s house, Birdie and me snuck out to our garage, loaded up our Radio Flyer wagon—besides bringing library books home in it, we take the coaster on all our snooping missions, except for the cemetery ones, because it’s too hard to shove it over the black iron fence without all the tools and Birdie’s snacks falling out—and under the cover of darkness we made our way over to the Abernathys’.

  10:35 p.m. The Finley sisters were preparing to spy on our suspect at 7119 N. Keefe Ave.

  I was, anyway. After all the brouhaha Birdie caused on the night pom-pom-waving Mrs. Tate was in her rumpus room pumping away for Mr. Horace Mertz, I didn’t trust my sister to remember to keep her mouth shut, so I made her be the lookout.

  FACT: If it turns out that Skip Abernathy really is the one stealing from little kids whose lives are already so cruddy because they are forced to listen to missionaries hour after hour, day after day, trying to convert them to Catholicism under the scorching sun in the Congo just so they can get shinier hair, blow their noses, and have no b.o., he should be very ashamed of himself. Not for thieving, of course. It would be two-faced of me to condemn him on that count, because hardly a week goes by that I don’t ignore the Thou Shalt Not Steal Commandment.

  PROOF: I’m a light-fingered Louie during the day and an even better cat burglar at night. (Secret God’s work, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t rememb
er the exact words, but He told somebody in olden times something like, “It’s easier for a camel to get into Heaven than it is for a rich person.” So even though our neighbors and the store owners don’t deserve it, me sneakily lightening their load of worldly goods is greasing the hinges on the Pearly Gates for them.)

  I most often make things disappear from Gert Klement’s house because I want her to think that she’s got that old-person sickness of going hard in her arteries, but sometimes I just swipe her stuff because I am a big believer in an eye for an eye. She’s trying to steal so much from my sister and me, so tit for tat, right? And, okay, sometimes my fingers get sticky at Kenfield’s Five and Dime, Dalinsky’s Drugstore, and Melman’s Hardware, too, but only if I run out of important supplies like Tums or Hershey’s kisses or Three Musketeers bars, or if Birdie or Charlie need something important ASAP. Like the night-light I stuck under my T-shirt at the five and dime that’s so powerful it lit up the insides of my sister’s brain and made her nightmares stop and makes me feel like I’m already on the Miss America stage when I’m practicing my routine in the middle of the night. And the Bowie knife I stole from the hardware store? That was for Charlie, because whittling is one of his most important hobbies. And fine, there was this one time that I slipped two pairs of hose out of Janet’s Dress Shop on Lisbon St. and stuck them in the bottom of Louise’s unmentionables drawer when her last pair got a runner in them. (That was kind of a kooky thing for me to do, I know, but what the heck. All the gal’s got going for her is her looks.)

  So anyhoo, there Birdie and me were last night over at the Abernathys’. I was about to spy into Skip’s bedroom window, hoping to catch him counting out the money he stole from the pagan babies, when his dad came banging out of the back door of the house to light up. Cigar smoke gives my sister a sneezing attack, which is why we had to hotfoot it out of there before we had the chance to get the goods on our suspect.

  “As a matter of fact,” our neighbor who’s got her nose stuck into everybody’s business, but the farthest into the Finley sisters’ business, tells Louise so high and mighty from the other side of the hedge, “a very troubling incident took place in the neighborhood last night that I’m quite certain will turn out to be a matter for the police.”

  Uh-oh.

  Just like I was afraid of, it looks like the wretched geezer got the better of me. She must’ve watched Birdie and me sneaking toward the Abernathys’ out of her front window after she turned her lights off and she’s about to rat us out again. Not only to our mother, but the men in blue, too.

  Louise must also be worried about that, because her good-smelling Jergen’s lotion hands are clamping down around Birdie’s and my necks. She knows the cops showing up at our front door would wreck her chances to be the new treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society. Under no circumstances do those gals want one of their muckety-mucks to have jailbirds for kids, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen if Gert squeals on Birdie and me. Officer Mick Dunn, Davey Dunn’s dad, came by the house to lecture us in the living room the last time we got caught spying into our neighbors’ windows. He made Birdie and me sit on the sofa, but he stood and gave us a good talking-to. “I’ll let you off with another warning,” he threatened, “but if I have to come back one more time . . .” He looked over at our mother fuming in Daddy’s favorite chair, and then he narrowed his already somewhat beady eyes at us and pointed to the handcuffs that were hanging off his creaky black leather belt. “You get my drift, girls?”

  Birdie didn’t, of course, because she was smiling her head off when she asked him if she could play with his billy club, but I certainly did. And so did the gal standing next to me who’s turned whiter than my Holy Communion dress. “A troubling incident?” Louise asks as she clamps her fingers tighter around her daughters’ necks. “What kind of troubling incident?”

  The #1 person on my SHIT LIST is not looking at our mother anymore, she’s glaring even harder at me with eyes the color of an enemy submarine lying in wait at the bottom of the ocean when she says across the hedge, “Sister . . . Margaret . . . Mary . . . has . . . gone . . . missing!” My mother gasps, so Birdie does, too, but I gotta keep my wits about me. Getting questioned by Gert about any crime committed in the neighborhood from stolen merchandise to fires to broken windows is nothing new. She raked me over the coals about the missing Pagan Baby money, too. That’s how come I’m 100% positive that I know what’s gonna come out of her mouth next. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Sister’s disappearance, would you, Theresa?”

  “Me?” I answer with my second-best most innocent look because I already used my first-best most innocent look up on Louise. “I certainly do not know anything about Sister Margaret Mary going missing, Missus Klement. Goodness gracious, that’s . . . that’s . . .”

  The best news ever!

  But, obviously, it’d be stupid to give my sworn enemy that kind of ammunition to use against me, so I put on my this-is-the-worst-news-ever look, the kind all the movie gals get—Loretta Young, she does the best horrified looks so beautifully—and say to Gert, “That’s . . . terrible news!” even though it’s anything but. In fact, I’m pretty sure what I might be beholding here is the living, breathing Holy Trinity of famous sayings!:

  1. The Lord’s one about giveth-ing and taketh-ing away.

  2. Mr. Walt Disney’s one about dreams coming true.

  3. Daddy’s one about never, ever throwing in the towel.

  Here I was feeling so down in the mouth because I thought Gert was going to tattle on the Finley sisters to Louise and the coppers, and on top of that, it was starting to look like I’d imagined it all and bloody nothing took place in the cemetery last night, but now . . . my cup run-eth over-eth! Birdie and me are not going to get spanked and we’re not going to the hoosegow, and sure, the Mutual Admiration Society might’ve lost the chance to solve a murder, but we just got our first-ever missing person case dropped in our lap instead!

  Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.

  Now that I think about this, maybe THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN is not one we should tackle after all. I mean, what if we actually found the despised principal of St. Kate’s? I wouldn’t put it past the pissed-off kids in the parish to drag us over to the Washington Park Zoo to do something biblically bad to get back at us. Something like throwing us to the lions.

  On the other hand . . . searching for the school’s top penguin might be worth taking the risk of getting eaten alive. Yes, I think Daddy would agree with me if he was here, because whenever he threw his paycheck into the pot when he was playing poker in Lonnigan’s back room with the factory men, he’d lean down and whisper in my ear, “Always go for broke, kiddo.”

  Wait just another cotton-pickin’ minute.

  What if . . . what if there is more here than meets the eye of this private eye? The last thing I want to do is assume again, but I thought the screech I heard last night coming from the cemetery sounded familiar, so maybe our school principal isn’t just missing, maybe she . . . dear, holy Mother of God. Did you just drop a fantastic twofer crime into The Mutual Admiration Society’s laps?

  Q. Did the limp body I saw getting carried behind the Gilgood mausoleum last night beneath the flickering streetlights belong to not just a missing principal, but a kidnapped and murdered principal?

  A. Outlook good.

  Well . . . amen to that, Sister.

  Amen, amen!

  5

  JUST LIKE IDA LUPINO

  The scrumptious-smelling red apple breeze is pushing around the yellow-and-white-checked curtains next to the avocado stove in our kitchen, where I’m putting the finishing touches on our breakfast while Louise puts the finishing touches on herself at the vanity table in her bedroom.

  FACT: Daddy was our chief cook and bottle washer, but since I stepped into his shoes, I have to be the one to scramble the eggs and Spam in the black fry pan every morning. If Birdie and me want to live to see another day, that is.

  PROOF: Lo
uise Mary Fitzgerald Finley was the prime suspect on a recent detecting job that The Mutual Admiration Society didn’t have to break a sweat to solve—THE CASE OF THE TROTS.

  At St. Kate’s potluck dinner last month that always takes place in our school cafeteria, parishioners who helped themselves to a scoop of the beef and whatever else it was that our mother stirred into the “gourmet” casserole that made it smell like toe jam got awful trots, and boy, oh, boy, were they ever sore. When the finger-pointing suspicion fell on Louise’s mystery casserole almost immediately—unbeknownst to her, she has a reputation around here for being the antonym of Chef Boyardee—she didn’t put the blame on the butcher for selling her bad hamburger, but she didn’t deny the rumor after I started it, either. I really like Mr. Wisnewski, he tells the best Polack jokes in the neighborhood, so I felt like a louse after I thumbtacked one of my poison-pen letters on the church bulletin board:

  ATTENTION PARISHIONERS!

  BEWARE!

  The meat at Wisnewski’s Butcher Shop is no good!

  Yours in Christ,

  The Watcher

  Like they say, “Charity begins at home,” so what choice did I have?

  I guarantee you, nobody would write down the name of a gal who almost diarrhea-ed them to death on the Pagan Baby election ballot and mark my words, if our mother loses out on being treasurer when that vote takes place, chances are that she’ll blame Birdie and me and our “shenanigans” for messing up her chances.

  This is far-fetched, but it has crossed my mind that Louise wants to be treasurer so bad because she’s going to stealthily “borrow” some money out of the club’s coffers to save our house from the First Wisconsin Bank. When Daddy was still here, her and him fought all the time about how much more hard-up we were than the other families in the neighborhood. Mr. Fleming, the father of Mary Jane Fleming, used to call the house once a week to ask where the mortgage money was, but now that we don’t have some of Daddy’s paycheck anymore, Mr. Fleming calls every day. (I think he wants to send us to the poorhouse.)