Snarky Park

by Cathy Lubenski

  “Yeah,” Dreadlocks said, “that looked almost painful. Almost.” He thrust out a hand to Cully. “I’m Andrew Corwin. Everybody calls me Drew.”

  “William Cully, but everyone just calls me Cully. This is Bertie Mallowan.” The two men shook hands solemnly, almost blood brothers having just missed a pummeling by angry “massage therapists.”

  “Hey, lemme buy you a drink,” Cully said, taking Bertie’s elbow and steering her toward the entrance to a nearby bar. “You saved our lives back there, dude. We were in danger of being breasted, er bested, by a bunch of angry broads. Sorry, Bert, women.”

  They settled in at a small table looking out onto the street. “I’m buying. What do you want, Drew? A beer okay?” Cully asked.

  “Sure.”

  “A beer okay for you, Bert?” At her nod, he walked to the bar, elbowed his way between a couple of burly guys watching a hockey game on the over-the-bar TV.

  Bertie smiled tentatively at Drew, whom she continued to think of as Dreadlocks. He was almost as tall as Cully, with brown eyes and a nice smile. His skin was a creamy brown color; even with dreads, he was nice looking. He dressed in what Bertie thought of as hippie chic: a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled up, jeans and flip-flops. There were beads threaded into his hair and he was wearing a necklace and bracelet made of braided leather.

  “So … wow! Does that happen at every meeting?” She picked up the beer Cully placed in front of her and took a big, slurping sip.

  Drew took his own big gulp and wiped foam from his lips with the back of a hand. “Nope, that was definitely a first. Most of the time, it’s pretty damn boring. I gotta hand to Buddy, he started his presidency with a bang.”

  “But he seems like such a boob,” Cully said, straight-faced.

  “Chumba-wumbas,” Drew countered.

  “Chesticles.”

  “Flapdoodles.”

  Bertie slammed her beer mug down, splashing cold beer onto the table.

  “Cut it out! Drew, what was that all about? Skins vs. ’tex? I mean, c’mon! Aren’t there more important issues than that?”

  “Oh, sure, but that’s an example of Buddy’s leadership in action. He picked the protest topic for that one. Rowley let him take over a few times in the past and he always comes up with something … well, let’s say goofy, to be kind.”

  “Like?” Bertie asked.

  “Like the time he sent two groups out. One went to a site where they’re building windmills. They were protesting because birds get killed flying into the blades.”

  “Yeah? So what, sounds reasonable to me.”

  “But he sent the second group to the same place to support windmills. You know, wind as a clean, alternative energy source.”

  Bertie gawped at him. “He sent two groups to the same place?”

  “Yep. Let’s just say that Buddy doesn’t have a firm grasp of the tenets of activism, but he sure was keen to be in charge. He was always challenging Rowley, even in public.”

  “So he wanted to take over?”

  “Guess so. I gotta wonder how long he’s going to last, though. He’s really pushing the corn fields and corn isn’t the most environmentally friendly crop to grow, but I’m not really an expert on the whole thing. I’m a stockbroker; we don’t get out into the fields much.”

  “A stockbroker? They let you have dreads?”

  Bertie was losing Drew’s attention to the hockey game. Cully was already riveted by a fight between two players on the ice.

  “Drew?”

  “Oh, yeah, as long as you make money, they don’t care. It’s actually kind of a cool place.”

  “We’re thinking of showing up for the Saturday work session. Right, Cully?” She kicked him under the table to get his attention. “Right?”

  He grunted in reply. “Cheeze,” Bertie thought, “didn’t they have enough violence for one night?” There weren’t even any naked female chumba-wumbas in the hockey game.

  “Yeah, I think we might just show up on Saturday,” she repeated.

  Drew and Cully drifted over to the bar to watch the hockey game while Bertie nursed her beer at the table. When she could see the bottom of the mug, she stood, ready to leave Cully to find his own way back to the apartment, but the door to bar swung open with a bang and Felanie and another woman from this evening’s fray burst into the room with the force of a small hurricane.

  Away from the sterile background of the community center and without her wig, Felanie looked more like a young party girl out for a fun evening than a … whatever she was. Her companion, albeit a little older and harder looking, also blended into the bar’s casual atmosphere.

  The hockey game was suddenly less important to the male denizens of the bar, who turned their attention to the new arrivals. After getting a beer, Felanie joined Bertie at her table.

  “Hi, I remember you. You were sitting next to me at the meeting, right? I hope we didn’t scare you too much,” she asked Bertie.

  “Well … we were glad to get out before the cops arrived. Did you get busted?”

  “Nah, we snuck out a side door when we heard the sirens. I don’t think anyone actually got arrested.” Felanie’s friend joined them and was introduced to Bertie as Doreen, aka Miss Demeanor. She looked to be in her 40s with dark hair in a ponytail. She was wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a checked blouse tied under her breasts.

  “That Buddy guy, what do you know about him?” Felanie asked Bertie.

  “Nothing, really. Remember? This was our first meeting.”

  “There’s something wrong with him, I think. He’s not legit. During The End’s protest he snuck into the, ahem, business and told the girls he’d call off the protest if he received some, ahem, free service.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, what a cuh-reep. So one of the girls, uh, gave him some service but then he disappeared and the protest kept going. I’d like to get my hands on his scrawny little neck.” Felanie twisted her fists together in a wringing motion and Bertie was glad the woman who’d been swinging Buddy Laird around by his hair had gotten to him before Felanie.

  The women talked about what all women talk about in bars – boyfriends, periods, clothes – until Cully came back to the table and announced that the hockey game was over. Felanie and Doreen eyed Cully with interest before Bertie said her goodbyes and she and Cully left.

  At the apartment, they shared an uneasy intimacy while getting ready for bed. Uneasy on Bertie’s part since she still didn’t know how Cully felt about being thrown back together.

  She had stacked a pile of clean sweatshirts to wear to bed over pajama bottoms, to keep from appearing the least bit sexually inviting, and let out a shriek when she came into the living room/kitchen for a glass of milk before bed and found him standing there in boxer shorts and nothing else.

  The low light gleamed off his smooth chest and arms, which were muscled and tanned. His legs, one of his best features, were hairy and muscular and Bertie wondered if he was still running every day.

  She turned away. “Get some more clothes on … now,” she said.

  “Bert, for God’s sake, we were married, what the hell is the difference?”

  “The difference is, we’re not married now. Get some clothes on.” She turned back to her dresser, pulled a sweatshirt off the stack and threw it at him.

  “Hey, this is mine,” he said, looking at the University of Pittsburgh logo on it. “I’ve been looking for this for years.”

  “Well, now you’ve found it. Put it on.”

  Cully pulled on the shirt and settled into the pull-out sofa bed. Bertie got her milk and crawled under the covers on her bed in the bedroom. Even though they were in separate beds in separate rooms, the apartment was so small that they were very close, only a thin wall keeping them apart.

  Bertie listened to Cully breathe for awhile and, unable to sleep, asked, “So what do you think about tonight?”

  “I’m not sure what I think about Buddy Laird, after hearing what Drew had to sa
y and what Felanie told you. He sounds like a weirdo.”

  “Right, and not a very nice one. I think there’s something screwy going on there.”

  “Yeah, me, too. We should go to the work session Saturday.”

  Bertie sighed in exasperation. “Boy, what a good idea. I’m glad you thought of it.”

  They lay quietly again. Cully’s breathing slowed, but Bertie stared at the ceiling. She rolled over and asked, softly, “What do you think happens to memories, Cully?”

  His voice was drowsy. “Huh? Memories? I don’t know, Bert. What memories?”

  “To all the memories that people have. When they die, what do you think happens to their memories? Do they die, too?”

  It was quiet so long that Bertie thought he’d fallen asleep, then he answered, so softly that she almost didn’t hear him.

  “I guess if you’re lucky enough to have someone to share them with, they could live forever.”

  She sighed. “That’s a nice thought.” She rolled over again and fell asleep.

  But Cully stayed awake for a long time after that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bertie took a few hours off the next morning to file her formal statement with Madison. When she called Howard to let him know she’d be late, he greeted the news with a frozen silence. Bertie rolled her eyes and waited him out.

  Finally he said, “OK, but you’ve got work here piling up. I’ll have to find someone else to do it.”

  This kind of pouty blame/shame game played by management drove Bertie crazy. He was looking for guilt, but she gave him cheery acceptance.

  “Cool. Thanks, Howard. See you in a few.”

  Bertie’s request to talk to Homicide Detective Madison was taken by an attractive young woman in uniform behind a desk, who picked up a phone and relayed the message.

  Two minutes later, she saw Madison come out of an office down a long hallway and beckon her. She passed two more attractive women and started wondering about the “Charlie’s Angels” effect on the young females of today. “What the hell, they all want to be Drew Barrymore?” she thought.

  Madison greeted her and led her into the office, furnished sparsely with a desk, a computer, and a chair. Bertie quickly scanned his desk for photos, but there weren’t any.

  “I was planning to send a patrol car for you if you hadn’t shown up soon, Bertie.”

  He looked hot. That was all she could think of. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up, his muscular, hairy forearms and slender hands were driving her nuts. Let other women get turned on by buns and six-pack abs, Bertie was a forearm woman. “Get a grip, Bertie,” she thought.

  “Um, yeah, well I’m here now. What do I have to do?”

  “I’d like you to write out what happened the night of the murder and sign it. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just the facts.”

  “Ma’am.”

  He smiled. “Yes, right, just the facts, ma’am.” He pushed a tablet and pen her way, and stood up. “I’ll leave you to it. When you’re done, just stick your head out the door, and let Marcy at the front desk know. I’ll come back and we’ll talk.”

  He walked out, closing the door behind him, leaving Bertie to wonder how he’d managed to stay single so long after his divorce with all the beautiful young policewomen around.

  She struggled with her statement, mostly because she wanted to write it like a newspaper story, not a “just the facts” dry-as-dust statement, but she finally finished and yoo-hooed to Marcy at the front desk.

  Madison joined her again, scanned her statement, put it down on the desk and looked at her long and hard.

  “Hi, Bertie,” he said.

  “Hi, Madison.” She smiled. He smiled. They’d connected.

  “This is pretty straightforward but I wanted to ask you again about what Poke said to you before he died. Can you repeat it to me, exactly as you remember it?”

  Bertie closed her eyes. She willed her memory back to that evening: The sticky heat, the slight breeze outside the ballroom, Rowley Poke staggering out of the darkness.

  “He fell, and I started yelling for help. I got down on my knees, trying to put pressure on the wound and he started gurgling. That’s the only way I can describe it. And he said, ‘American, gurgle gurgle. And I said, ‘what?” And he said, “American, gurgle, car.’ And that was it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as I can be, Madison. It was pretty scary, you know. Women were screaming at that point and people were running around. It happened really fast.”

  “OK, that matches your original statement and the one you just made. I’ve checked the car registration of the guests at the party that night and only a fraction drive American cars. They mostly own Jags, Beemers and Benzers. Oh, and I’m sorry we had to take your dress, Bertie, but I think it was pretty well ruined anyway.”

  “Puh-leeze, I don’t want it back. It was Katie’s anyway, she’s letting me borrow some of her clothes while she’s on her honeymoon, but I don’t think she’d want it back either. I am getting kind of strapped for dress-up clothes, though. They don’t give me a clothes allowance at the Beacon-Banner.”

  Madison stood, took her hand and pulled her up. He scanned her from knee to neck. “What size are you? About an eight?”

  Bertie had never had a man ask her about her dress size.

  “Ummm, no.” She was more like a twelve but she wasn’t going to tell him that. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  They were still standing, still facing each other, but the wall-to-wall windows in the office prohibited any physical contact. Bertie was soaking in his wonderful guy smell when a thought occurred to her: Should she tell him about Howard Schompe’s love life? It felt wrong journalistically, but morally, shouldn’t she help catch a murderer? And besides, Tiffany said it was a common scandal at the Beacon-Banner, so …

  “I’m guessing you already know this, but one of the editors at the paper, Howard Schompe, was having an affair with Mrs. Poke.”

  “Bertie, you’re not messing around in this case, are you? You were almost killed trying to get your precious story in the Bellingham case.” His smile had fled. Hers followed.

  “Madison, I can’t stand my job. It’s not what I want to do the rest of my life or even the rest of this week. There has to be something better out there and this is my chance to get it. I can’t stop.”

  “Be very careful, Bertie. Especially at work. Your boss, Dillard Johnson, wasn’t always the big philanthropist he pretends to be now.”

  “Oooh, give, Madison. What’s he done?”

  “Before he made his big money, he owned a small Midwest paper. His staff was threatening to strike and shut down the paper for awhile – “

  “That must’ve been awhile ago, newspapers don’t have unions anymore, that’s for sure,” Bertie said bitterly.

  “Let me finish, please. Anyway, Johnson said he’d give his employees their Christmas turkeys as a gesture of good will, and handed them out.”

  “And?” Bertie asked, impatient for him to reach the point of the story.

  “He handed them out at the beginning of the day and there was no place to put them, so they sat there all day, thawing. Three people died from food poisoning. He paid off the survivors, handed out some college scholarships, and the whole thing went away, but the bottom line is that a lot of people think he did it on purpose, he killed those people.”

  “It could’ve been an accident, too, Madison.”

  “There was no strike; no one had the courage to fight on.”

  “I can see it on TV now – ‘When Giblets Go Bad, A Lifetime True Story.’ I don’t think that’s going to stop me, Madison.”

  A look of sadness stole over Madison’s face, chasing his scowl away.

  “We’re back where we started, aren’t we?” he said softly.

  Bertie stared at him, then left his office without answering.

  ***

  As soon as Bertie logged into her computer at work, a message fro
m Tiffany popped up. “Let me know when you’re free, I have to show you something.”

  Howard Schompe had piled a small mountain of work on her desk; her punishment for taking time off and it took Bertie a couple of hours to work through it. Her penance finally done, she stood up as casually as she could and ambled away from her desk. “Cheeze, even prisoners get bathroom breaks,” she thought.

  Tiffany was hunched over her computer in another section of the cubicle farm that was the Beacon-Banner’s newsroom and as Bertie walked by, she turned and gave her a bulging-eyes look that she hoped Tiffany translated into “Follow me, I’m free now.”

  Bertie snagged a stall in the women’s bathroom and felt her backside go slowly numb as she sat and waited until Tiffany showed up 10 minutes later. After Tiffany’s tentative “Bertie?” she stood up and exited the stall.

  “Cripes, Tiffany, I can’t wait around like this. Howard has me on a short leash. What the hell did you want to show me?”

  Tiffany checked under the stall doors for feet, and seeing none said, “I found something that can help us … you know.”

  She pulled a pink box out of the bag she was carrying and thrust it at Bertie, who took it and turned it over to read the teal-colored print:

  LITTLE MISS SPY

  Eavesdrop without anyone knowing and find out what your friends are saying about you! Learn how to pick locks! Leave messages in invisible ink! Use a periscope to see without being seen! (For girls ages 6 to 18.)

  “I found it in a toy store. It’s perfect for what we want to do,” Tiffany said.

  “Uh, what is it we want to do?” Bertie asked.

  “We want to find out if Howard is taking up with Irene Poke again now that hubby is out of the way. C’mon, Bertie, get with the program. We can use the listening device to hear what he’s saying on the phone, and the periscope to … I don’t know, see without being seen.”

  “Little Miss Spy?”

  “Yeah, Little Miss Spy. It was only $24.95 with tax. Have you ever seen what real surveillance kits cost?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”