Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  27

  I cruised past MaryDell Paine’s house once to count the cars in her parking lot, not that that would tell me whether she was still at home. Her car—whatever it was—was probably locked into one of the stalls in their four-car garage. But when I spotted an old rusty Oldsmobile parked there, one that had also been parked there during my last visit, I felt pretty sure the maid was inside.

  I drove around the block and parked in front of a mini-mansion owned by some former friends of my parents. They might send out the houseman to question my presence, but once he reported that it was only a Cain sitting out there, they’d merely shake their heads and attribute my aberrant behavior to the fact that everybody knew that all the Cains were crazy. I’d never liked them anyway, not even in the days when they used to come over to play poker and drink martinis with my folks. He’d always tweaked my cheeks hard enough to hurt, and she’d always sat on her massive butt while my mother ran back and forth from the kitchen to the den with drinks and sandwiches. Let ‘em cluck. The hell with ‘em.

  I let my engine run for a few minutes, delaying the moment when I would have to switch it off and the car would cool down.

  My plan wasn’t very sophisticated—I was simply waiting for the lady of the house to leave. What I figured was that a Super Volunteer, Overcommitted Person like MaryDell was bound to have more committee meetings scheduled than the Pope. And if I knew my Dedicated Civic Person, she wouldn’t let a little thing like her brother being missing and wanted for murder get in the way of her responsibility to chair the Committee to Paint the This or the League to Build the That. If she didn’t have any meetings to go to this afternoon, surely she would tonight. The weather wouldn’t matter; a mere blizzard rarely canceled anything for very long in Poor Fred.

  There was one other car, or rather a van, parked on the block, with “Mitchum Dry wall Contractors” painted across both sides. Cheezit, the cops. I wanted to drive over, roll down a window, and ask them if Mrs. Paine had left the house in the last few minutes, but I knew they wouldn’t appreciate the attention. On the other hand, if Geof hadn’t found time to tell them of my mission, they might come wandering over to inquire about me. It struck me as kind of funny—them sitting over there watching for somebody to arrive; me sitting down here waiting for somebody else to leave.

  We gotcha covered, MaryDell, I thought.

  Evidently, Geof had informed them, because nobody bothered me.

  At five o’clock I turned on the engine again and ate the banana while the car warmed up. I decided to save the coffee for the periods between heat. At five-twenty, I turned on the engine again and ate half of the peanut butter sandwich and one of the double-fudge brownies. At five thirty-five, even after another quarter-cup of coffee, and even though I was trying very hard to wait at least another twenty minutes—to warm up the engine, if not to eat—I chickened out again. Both the afternoon and the car were getting darker and colder. I had tried to read my mystery while there was still enough light, but it was too good; I was afraid that if I got engrossed in it, I might miss seeing MaryDell arrive or leave. God, I hoped it was leave. I was already feeling like a popsicle, and if she was away now, and then came home, and I had to wait still longer for her to leave, I’d probably give up. It was obvious to me that I wasn’t cut out for surveillance work, especially not in below-freezing weather.

  A newish, pale yellow Cadillac Eldorado sedately rounded the corner down the street and headed my way. It slowed at the entrance to the Paines’ driveway before turning in and going up the drive. It was MaryDell herself, in a mink coat and matching mink turban. From my distance, it looked like a small, plump woodland creature was behind the wheel.

  “Oh, frozen buffalo shit,” I said in disgust. The fact that each word blew frostily into the air only deepened my sense of self-pity.

  Even though it had only been five minutes since I last warmed up the car, I switched on the engine again and then ate the rest of the sandwich and the Fritos. It is not easy to eat Fritos while wearing ski gloves, but don’t good things often come at the cost of some effort? I was starting in on the second brownie when the yellow Cadillac with the mink at the wheel came barreling down the drive again, slid nearly all the way across the street, backed up with a ferocious spinning of its wheels, and spun off at a good clip down the street. I’d always heard that minks were testy creatures; well, who could blame them? Or maybe MaryDell was late for a meeting, I surmised.

  “Okay, Little Liza.” I sighed. “Cross that ice.”

  I got out of my car, slogged up MaryDell’s front steps—which, surprisingly, had not yet been cleared of the latest snow—and rang the doorbell. The maid answered right after Yankee Doodle came to town and just before he stuck the feather in his cap.

  If the maid recognized me, she didn’t let on.

  “Is MaryDell home?”

  “She just left.”

  “Did she leave a package for me?”

  She frowned. “What package?”

  “It’s a report. She might have put it in a manila envelope, or a binder of some sort.” I continued, with truth if not with candor. “She was supposed to get it to me for an important meeting that’s being held tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Darn. I’ve really got to have that thing…. Do you think she might have left it in her office? Could I look for it there? I’ll bet she meant to leave it out for me, but she was in a hurry and she just forgot.”

  “She was in a hurry all right,” the maid said dryly.

  “I’m freezing,” I said, finally telling a complete truth. “Could I come in?”

  With a grudging air, she admitted me, shutting the door behind us.

  “Is it warm in here?”

  She pulled her head back, like a chicken. “Can’t you tell?”

  “Not yet.” I looked her in the eyes and said in my best authoritative executive voice, “I can see that she didn’t leave it on the hall table. I’ve really got to have that report. Where’s her office? I’ll take a quick peek there.”

  She looked exasperated, but then merely shrugged and surrendered the fort easily. “I guess it’s okay. Come on back here, then.”

  I followed her down the hall, past the kitchen, past the sun porch, and on into a corner of the house that was more a nook than an office. It was barely big enough for a small, built-in desk with two telephones, a swivel chair, and three file cabinets jammed in against the desk. It surprised me—I’d expected something more elegant and official. I knew that many, maybe even most, women who do volunteer work feel uneasy about granting themselves the dignity of a full-fledged office in which to conduct their business, but I had not expected such insecurity from MaryDell.

  Her desktop was not particularly neat, but the papers on it were sufficiently revealed so that I could see there was no report pertaining to a recreation hall for former mental patients.

  The maid was standing at my shoulder.

  I turned boldly to the first file cabinet to my left. I pulled out the file labeled “R-S,” expecting a brown hand to clamp over mine.

  She didn’t stop me.

  I quickly found the file I was looking for, in the first place I looked, under “Recreation Hall.” Easy. Feeling cocky, I turned to the maid and said, “Does she have a copier?”

  She jerked her head, bidding me to follow her.

  The copier, it turned out, was in the kitchen, in a hallway leading to the garage. The maid had stopped following me around and had returned to her kitchen work. While I ran the copying machine, I reflected on my act, which seemed to me to be about on a moral par with breaking and entering. Was 1 justifying my means to suit my ends? Yes, I decided with no great pride, I guess so. I made only one copy—as if that were some sort of penance—and returned the original to MaryDell’s file. With the copy tucked into my coat, I clomped back into the kitchen.

  “May I talk to you?”

  Anita looked up, suspiciously, from the pot she was
stirring, and her former truculence reappeared. “What for?”

  “You did me a favor yesterday—”

  “What favor?” she asked, scornfully.

  “You gave me the picture of Kitt Blackstone.”

  Her eyes shifted away from mine, back to the contents of her pot, but at least she didn’t deny it. “Yeah, so what?”

  “Well, I just wondered why, that’s all.”

  “What d’you mean, why?”

  I wished that she would look at me again, so that I could smile at her and display a few friendly teeth. “Mrs. Paine gave the cops a more recent picture of him, so I just wondered why you gave me that one.”

  “Good God Almighty.” Her head jerked up. Although she sounded angry, the quick glance she shot at me looked frightened. “I didn’t know she give them a picture. Just forget I give the other damn thing to you, just forget it!”

  She was stirring faster now and bits of thick creamy sauce slopped over onto the stove top.

  “Oh, hell!” she said furiously. With quick, nervous motions, she turned off the gas under the pot and wiped her hands on her apron. She glared at me and said, “All right!”

  She walked, almost ran, over to a closed door, which she opened to reveal what was probably her “maid’s room.” I saw beyond her back a neatly made single bed, an armchair, a potted plant, and a dresser. She got down on her knees in front of the dresser, pulled open the bottom drawer, and lifted off items of clothing until she found what she was looking for. As she walked back toward me, clasping the object to her chest, I saw that it was a photo album.

  “Here!” She thrust it at me and stood watching me as I leafed through it. She had her hands pressed over her heart, as if to still its beating.

  What I saw were family photos, in which I recognized MaryDell and her tall, beefy husband, along with many of their friends or relatives whom I didn’t know. What many of the photographs had in common, outside of repeated faces, were small holes cut in them. They were holes where another face or another figure should have been.

  “Did she cut him out?” I asked.

  “He did,” she said, and her eyes narrowed again.

  “He?”

  “Mr. Paine. He got mad one time, at all the money they was spending on Mr. Kitt, and he took him some scissors and just cut that boy clean out of every picture in the house. Said if Mr. Kitt ever come around again, he’d cut his real head off his real shoulders, too.”

  “Why, Anita? Why’d he hate him that much?”

  “It was the money, like I said.” She eyed me, looking scornful and disgusted. “Plus, you got to understand what it’s like having a crazy person around all the time—Mr. Kitt, he was dirty, he smelled, he yelled and cussed and stole things, he got violent sometimes, like they say, and he cost Mr. Paine lots of money in doctors and stuff.”

  “What do you mean violent?”

  “I mean crazy!” she yelled at me. “I mean throwing stuff around and breaking it, that’s what I mean! Expensive stuff. Nice stuff. He didn’t care what he broke!”

  “How did Mr. Paine feel about his wife helping Kitt?”

  “Hated it,” she said, more quietly. “He hates anybody doing anything to help Mr. Kitt. Mr. Paine, he thinks Mr. Kitt ought to pull himself up. One time Mr. Paine, he sabotaged a job that Mrs. Paine had got lined up for Mr. Kitt, just because Mr. Paine, he thought Mr. Kitt ought to have got it for himself.”

  “When did he cut these pictures out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe six, seven years ago.”

  “So you thought there wouldn’t be a picture to give to the police?”

  She didn’t reply, which I took for assent. I pulled out of my pocket the copy of the more recent picture of Kitt Blackstone and handed it to her.

  “Then where do you think Mrs. Paine got that picture of him?”

  She drew back her head in that chicken movement again and shoved the picture back at me.

  “That ain’t Mr. Kitt,” she said disdainfully, as if glad to catch me in some error. “Not unless he’s got him one of them hair transplants. Mr. Kitt’s been near bald since I can remember. And he’s got kind of a sweet face. He ain’t sweet, he’s crazy, but he’s got that kind of face, like a nice kid, even if he is forty-something years old. He sure don’t look nothing like this.”

  “Do you know who this man is?”

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  “But this is weird,” I said.

  “You ought to try workin’ here,” she said dryly.

  “I still don’t really understand why you gave it to me.” She smiled, a cold and malicious smirk that nearly hid her fear.

  “Maybe I like to put them to a little trouble now and then, like they’s always puttin’ me,” she snapped. “And maybe doing something like this beats puttin’ rat poison in their”—she sneered—“coq au vin. And maybe I just wanted to, that’s all, it ain’t none of your business why I do what I do.”

  I put the folded paper back in my coat pocket and slipped my gloves back on. “Why did you keep that little picture of Kitt, Anita? Were you fond of him?”

  “Him?” She stared incredulously at me. “He’s crazy.”

  “Why, then?”

  She shook her head, as if I were very stupid.

  “They can afford to throw away things. Even nice things. Real nice things. It’s a sin what they throw away.” She cocked an eyebrow, and a touch of dryness crept into her anger again. “You find interesting things when you empty wastebaskets in somebody else’s house. So I hold on to ‘em. ‘Cause you never know when they might come in handy.”

  “Do you know where he is, Anita?”

  “Mr. Kitt?” She laughed, an unpleasant, cynical cackle. “He don’t even know where he is half the time, so how should I know?”

  Too much time had passed, enough for at least a short meeting to convene, be conducted, and close. I started for the kitchen door, and she followed me.

  In the front hallway, with my hand on the doorknob, I started to tell her not to bother informing her employers about my visit. But as I turned to face her, my glance was caught by a sudden movement at the top of the front stairs.

  “What are you doing here, Jenny?” MaryDell called out. She started down the stairs toward us.

  “MaryDell?” I replied, dumbly.

  Anita whirled around as if her strings had been jerked.

  “Mrs. Paine,” she said in an angry, panic-stricken voice. “I didn’t hear you come back, ma’am, I thought you was gone….”

  “I haven’t been out of the house, Anita.”

  “Then who was that left in your car, Mrs. Paine?”

  I waited tensely for her answer, and when it came, I bolted out the front door, running and sliding down the lawn toward the police van.

  “Nobody, Anita,” she’d answered. “Nobody took my car. You must have imagined it.”

  28

  The cops in the van saw me coming and opened the back door to me. I climbed in, saying breathlessly, “That was Mob! That wasn’t Mrs. Paine—that was Kitt Blackstone driving that yellow Cadillac!”

  “Aw, shit!” exclaimed the officer who’d opened the door to me. He slammed the door shut, and we were moving before I’d had a chance to catch my balance. Besides the plainclothes officer in the back of the van, there was the driver, who was turning the wheel with one hand and holding the speaker to his radio in the other, barking information to the dispatcher. Both officers looked very young to me; I didn’t recognize them or know their names, but this was not the moment for introductions.

  We swerved around a corner, and I stumbled, then fell onto the carpeted floor. After righting myself, I leaned against a metal wall of the van, though that didn’t keep me from swaying violently, side to side, with the rocking and rolling movements of the vehicle. The driver was giving the dispatcher the Caddy’s license number. The other officer, after checking quickly to see if I was okay, had slipped up into the front passenger’s seat, displaying an agility to riv
al an acrobat’s. Left behind in the bare rear of the van, I looked around: this was no fancy surveillance vehicle, with cameras, monitors, radios, or telescopic lenses; this was just a plain old van used for plain old hiding and peeking. At least it was warm, thanks to a little portable heater attached to the wall directly opposite me. But the violent herky-jerky movements of the van, combined with the hot air blowing in my face, made me feel nauseated. I prayed that I would not distinguish myself by throwing up.

  There were small surveillance windows in the walls, but we were going too fast, and I was bouncing around too much to be able to look out of them. It was all I could do, in fact, to stay upright and to keep from hitting my head repeatedly against the side of the van. The officer in the passenger’s seat kept glancing back at me with a sick, half-smile of guilt and worry on his face. “We should have let you out!” he shouted back at me once. And then a few minutes later, “The Lieutenant’s gonna kill us if you get hurt!” And finally, “Jesus, here we go! Hang on, Ms. Cain!”

  Here we go where? I thought wildly.

  The van came to a sudden, sliding halt that sent me tumbling across the carpet. I slammed into the back of the driver’s seat. Involuntarily, I cried out at the pain of it, then cursed myself for a sissy. But the shoulder was the same one I’d hurt a few years before in a lobster pound. I heard the men grabbing shotguns and throwing open their doors. “Stay down!” they both hissed at me. I didn’t have any choice; I had to stay down because my shoulder was now lodged between the driver’s seat and the four-speed gear-shift mechanism. Blasts of cold air suddenly came at me in stereo from the two open front doors. No lights came on in the van when the doors opened; the cops must have fixed it so they wouldn’t. It was good and dark outside by then and bitterly cold.

  “I will never do anything like this again,” I swore to myself at that moment. I wasn’t hearing any noise from outside the van, which both reassured and terrified me. At least there hadn’t been any gunshots. Where in hell were we? And what was going on out there? Could I risk a look out?

  With as little movement as I could manage, I extracted myself from the van’s grasp and then inched over a bit until I could see out the passenger door. Under the bottom edge of it, I saw—thanks to the natural illumination of the moon on the snow—a Michelin tire with a Caddy insignia on the wheel cover. My heart went into its reggae mode, and I froze, unable to work up the courage either to move closer in order to see more, or to move completely out of what might be a line of fire. I felt sick again and found myself mentally paraphrasing the officer’s words with an “Aw, dammit.” I was never, never going to get myself into anything like this again. Never. Never.