Scot Free

by Catriona McPherson

  “I’m Lexy Campbell,” I said. “I’m your aunt’s therapist. I’ve been looking after her.” This I delivered with a ghost of a glance backwards to where Mizz Vi, half-cut and dishevelled, was beginning to wriggle out of the car. The driver, not trusted with the code, was looking stolidly forward and offering nothing.

  “Serpentina,” said the woman.

  “How did you get here so soon, Sparky?” Mizz Vi called over.

  “We were coming anyway,” Serpentina said.

  “Who’s we?”

  “I’ve got some news, Auntie.” She turned back towards the open door. “Allow me to present my husband, Jan.”

  A tall, slim, kind of catalogue-modelly man in overstarched casuals came out and stood frowning on the doorstep. “Call me Bang-Bang,” he said. His shirtsleeves and chinos crackled as he moved towards me and shook my hand.

  “You’re married?” said Vi. “Oh, Sparky. That’s … Oh, that’s … Bang-Bang, come and kiss your auntie!”

  Jan went trotting over to the taxi with his clothes crunching.

  I didn’t know what was causing her such surprise, but using my professional experience, I found this couple way bogus. Bang-Bang-Jan should have had a skinny wife with life goals and two hundred dollar flip-flops. This dumpy woman in the muumuu with the comedy hairdo wasn’t in his league.

  “And these are Jan’s cousins, Alex and Peter,” Sparky-Serpentina went on, as a pair of thugs from central casting sidled out and stood with their hands clasped behind their backs watching me from behind sunglasses.

  The starched man had plucked Mizz Vi out of the taxi and was ushering her—practically carrying her—past me, into the house.

  “Lexy,” she said. “Thank you again. I don’t know where I would have been without you today.”

  “Please stop thanking me,” I said. “You need to rest. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yes,” she said, turning to face me while Bang-Bang-Jan kept pulling her, backwards now, into the house. “Maybe tomorrow. I can come to you or you—”

  “I’ll come here,” I said. “In case you’re tired. After lunch? Two o’clock?”

  “You remember the key code?” she said as she disappeared into the shadows of the dim hallway, with Bang-Bang’s arm firmly around her.

  “I remember,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  The two thugs turned smartly and disappeared after her. Jan came back out and sort of bowed. He might even have clicked his heels, except that he couldn’t possibly have clicked his heels, could he? Then he gave his bride a look and once again disappeared.

  “Thank you again for everything you’ve done,” said Sparky, her face about as sparky as a dead halibut. She looked numb with misery.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. Occupational hazard.

  “Not really,” she replied. “I loved Uncle Boom. I owed him everything. And I … ”

  “What?” I said. Killed him, I thought.

  “I betrayed him.”

  “Oh?” I said. “How’d you do that then?”

  “I hope you’ll forgive me being rude, Lexy,” she said, “but this is a time for family.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But let me give you my card.”

  I had about five thousand of them left and anyway it wasn’t as crass as it seemed because Americans give you their card all the time. I’ve been given cards by taxi-drivers whose sisters-in-law run scrap-booking classes and by pizza delivery guys whose college roommates are trying to kick-start climbing gyms and by antique dealers who sat next to me in the hairdressers and by hairdressers who outbid me at antique auctions and by the sisters-in-law of climbers who were raising money for pizza ovens by auctioning scrapbooks. When I shared a taxi with them.

  Sparky pocketed mine and handed over hers. See? She was at her auntie’s house to console the old lady about her new widowhood, but she had a few business cards on her.

  She stretched her lips at me and then stepped inside and shut the door. It was spring-loaded and well-insulated so, despite her determination to make her meaning clear, it closed with a soft pafp rather than a slam, but I got the message. I felt as if I’d just watched a little fish swim into the mouth of a shark and heard its teeth mesh.

  Even the taxi driver, not Visalia’s biggest fan, looked worried.

  “Bet you twenty that key code’s changed before tomorrow,” he said. He was right. Hell, he was more than right. We stopped and checked on the way out and the gate remained closed, telling me I had two more tries and one more try and then I was out of tries and my license plate had been photographed and would be held on file.

  ∞

  Back at the Last Ditch, Noleen was backing out of the room underneath mine with a maid’s cleaning cart.

  “Cops have been back,” she called in greeting as I was paying off the cab. “They were in your room.”

  She strolled over to the rank of dumpsters that cut off the view of the pool from the street (Feng Shui wasn’t the Last Ditch way) and tossed two empty Clorox bottles into the blue one. “I tell you,” she said. “Every time I think I’ve seen everything … ”

  I didn’t want to know what a motel guest might have done that needed two bottles of bleach and surprised an old-timer like Noleen, but before I could escape, someone shouted from the open door of the Skweeky Kleen.

  “Did it come out?”

  “My partner, Kathi,” said Noleen, then called back. “Like a dream. Still no clue what it was, but it washed out.”

  “Some people!” Kathi called back and then withdrew as a telephone rang inside.

  “I thought it was a menstruation incident,” Noleen said. Not that I asked. “Or it could have been beetroot,” she went on, even though I had started backing away. “Plus a blocked drain,” she added, despite the fact that I have never had a less interested look on my face in my life. “But I tell you … I don’t know what it was,” she concluded.

  “Good,” I said. “I mean, oh. I’m glad to hear it came out. So, anyway, it’s getting kind of warm for standing around.”

  Noleen looked at me and then at the sun, beating down mercilessly onto the concrete. “Warm?” she said. “It ain’t even ninety.”

  I turned and headed up the iron staircase towards my room. After a day of court, morgue, the empty midday bar, and those creepy nieces and nephews, I wanted nothing more than its blankness and the chance to wash my single pair of knickers so’s I didn’t have to wear them for a third day.

  I was in for a surprise. First off, someone—I guessed the Cuento cops, on a break from their prostitution-ring stakeout—had sprung my suitcases from the office where I’d abandoned them the evening before and left them sitting just inside the door. The door of the unrecognisable Room 213. It was transformed. There was a pale pink velvet chaise longue scattered with silk cushions. More silk cushions in pink, grey, and blue covered about a third of the bed, heaped up on top of a dove grey coverlet. The lamps had birds on the bases and clouds on the shades, and an oil painting of a foggy lake with ripples spreading out calmly from behind a solitary swan was on the wall.

  I sank down on to the chaise just as the door opened and a strange man walked in as if he owned the place. Or me. Or both.

  “Lexy, isn’t it?” he said. He was chiseled and gleaming, his hair shaved down to no more than a shadow on his mahogany skull and his perfect teeth almost blue as he flashed me a perfunctory smile. He wore a pink shirt cut like ice-skater’s spandex and grey trousers I could tell cost more than my entire wardrobe.

  “It is,” I said.

  “I’m Roger,” he said. “I understand you had some trouble earlier.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” I said. It was partly the trousers but mostly the brisk confidence.

  “I’m a pediatric surgeon,” he said. “Why?”

  “I … ” I said. I’ve had a lot of communication
training one way and another, besides starting out pretty gobby. I don’t think I’d ever been at a loss for words so often in my life before as the last twenty-four hours.

  “Todd said there was a spider?” Roger went on.

  “A tiny little one,” I said. “It was nothing.”

  “Right,” said Roger. “Exactly. You see,” he went on, with a look over his shoulder, “Todd is halfway through a program and whilst I understand that you meant to be kind, we’re trying—his doctor and I—to challenge the confabulations rather than confirm them.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I know there was no spider,” Roger said.

  “Oh!” I said, light dawning. “Cleptoparasitosis?”

  Roger sat down—flump!—onto the grey silk coverlet as if I’d punched him in the solar plexus. “Glory be,” he said.

  “I’m a clinical psychologist,” I told him. “Well, in Dundee I am. Here I’m a generic therapist working towards a licence. But see, the thing is there really was a … Wait though. He said there was a great big hairy one in army boots, in the bath. And I found a tiny little brown one like a gnat with spare legs, on the windowsill. Coincidence, probably, eh?” I kicked my shoes off, but Roger glanced at my feet and I’m sure his nostrils flickered so I wriggled them back on. “So how bad is he?”

  He rubbed one of his perfect hands, Rolex just peeping out from a pink cuff, over his perfectly stubbled jaw and groaned. “Well,” he said, “we’re living in the Last Ditch Motel. We left the house about a year ago. We rented an apartment, then a suite at the Hilton Garden, Best Western, DoubleTree, La Quinta, and … here we are. If this goes toes up, we’ll be camping.”

  “Doesn’t medication—” I began, but Roger knew the Last Ditch’s noises better than me and shushed me as Todd appeared round the open door.

  “You’re back!” he said. “I came to leave your key. Tah-dah! What do you think?” He did a slow turn in the middle of the room, showing off the painting, the pillows, the lamps, and then stepping off the Aubusson carpet—I hadn’t even noticed that!—and tidying the fringe.

  “Where did you get it all?” I said.

  “I had it in storage,” said Todd. “We’ve got tenants in our house and they wanted it unfurnished. You’re doing me a favour, really. This way if I come to borrow a cup of sugar I get to see all these pretty things.”

  “Are you a designer?” I said. “It really is gorgeous.”

  “A designer?” said Todd. “No. I’m an anesthesiologist.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “God, I’m sorry. That was really offensive.”

  Todd waved it away. “And so anyway,” he said, “what happened with your friend? Is he out? Is he with you?”

  “She,” I said. “Yep, she’s bailed. No, she’s gone home.” I think my face must have clouded as I remembered the door closing on Mizz Vi, the instant change of the key code at those towering gates.

  “What happened?” said Todd.

  “Her husband was killed last night. Don’t ask me to tell you how. You really don’t want it in your heads, believe me.”

  “Get out!” said Todd. “Is your friend the firework lady? Oh Em Gee. It was all over the front page of the Voyager. She murdered her husband, and she’s out on bail?”

  “I cosigned the bond,” I said.

  “You … ?” said Todd. “Well, for God’s sake pour us a glass of Chablis and tell us all!”

  “I haven’t got any Chablis.”

  “He’s probably filled your refrigerator,” Roger said. “As you see, Todd doesn’t really do boundaries.”

  “As you see, Roger tends to overpsychologize everyday life,” Todd shot back.

  “My apologies,” said Roger. “As you’ll find out, Todd likes to take care of people.”

  “As you’ll find out, Roger is troubled by normal amounts of everyday kindness.”

  “Normal?” said Roger. “What about when you fostered those hedgehogs?”

  “What about it? The PETA website linked to my Facebook post.”

  “Todd, you bought a stroller.”

  “I customized a stroller,” said Todd, reaching his phone out of his back pocket and scrolling through the photographs. “I Bento-ized it. Six little compartments. It was adorable. It went viral.”

  That was when I stopped listening. I had opened the fridge and my eyes filled. There was a bottle of Chablis, that was true. And on the counter above the fridge there were six beautiful wine glasses with spindly stems and the soap-bubble irridescence of really good crystal. But what had put the lump in my throat was the six-pack of pork pies and the three bars of Cadbury’s Whole Nut.

  “How did you find … These are genuine Melton Mowbray.”

  “I have connections,” Todd said, sepulchrally. “But they’re all pharmacists. When it comes to charcuterie, there’s a deli in Sacramento.”

  So, over pies, chocolate, and Chablis, I told them everything.

  Halfway through, Kathi from the Skweeky Kleen joined us. She was pretty much identical to Noleen, only years younger: her grandma haircut still dark and nothing on her t-shirt but a small sk logo. I looped back to clue her in and she listened, nodding all the time and showing, from a couple of short questions, that she was as sharp as a shiv.

  Later, as the sun sank, Noleen followed the squawks and shrieks to their source, and made a fifth, bringing a jug of margaritas with her. So I had to go back over it again. Noleen said plenty: Vi was a fool, Clovis was an asshat, Sparky was a bitch, Bang-Bang was a creep, Sicily was a dump, love was a mug’s game.

  By the time they left, some things seemed clear. Clovis “Boom” Bombaro was planning to skip out on his wife without even signing his divorce papers. Of course he was. He had fooled her into believing they’d start again in Sicily and she’d swallowed it whole. There was no age-old Sicilian family feud at the heart of this. Of course there wasn’t. What there was was a woman still in love after sixty-odd years and an old man too cussed to split his wealth with her. As to who had killed him … I couldn’t get past the idea that if Sparky was Clovis’s heir, she came to Bang-Bang with a hell of a sweetener besides her well-hidden charms. And he’d got that perfect nickname up and running pretty sharpish. Plus there was the two nightclub-bouncer cousins too.

  Because what kind of family goes to the house and waits for a therapist to bring their dear old auntie home? Why weren’t they at the courthouse, paying for a swanky lawyer for her? Why weren’t they at the jail, pounding on doors and demanding that she be set free?

  And how could I get her to wise up before they got rid of her too?

  Seven

  Life’s too short to count threads, if anyone’s asking me. Still, the first night between Todd’s dove-grey sheets slipped by me like a greased eel and when I woke up, with the sunshine slicing through the gap in his lavender window-treatments, my head resting in a cloud of goose-down on one of his big square pillows, and all my stuff on his padded satin hangers behind the doors of the fitted cupboards, life felt immeasurably better than it had only twenty-four hours before.

  I needed to see Mizz Vi, to set my mind at rest. And I wanted to speak to Mike again too, to point her in all the directions that led away from my sweet little old client and towards manifest villainy. And, I supposed as I turned over for the sheer joy of feeling all those counted threads against my bare skin (I didn’t have any nightwear worthy of the new linen and so I had done without), I should really phone home and let my family know that my shamefaced return had been postponed. Or I could email Alison. She was such a gossip she’d be round at my mum’s before her laptop went to standby. And then, even though I’d have to field a million tearful questions, at least I wouldn’t have to find a way to break the news.

  I worked at convincing myself for about five minutes, then I put on a pot of coffee and lifted the phone.

  “Change of plan, Mum,” I sai
d, when she answered. The coffee smelled even more like heaven than usual, and the smell of the first cup of coffee is sometimes the highlight of my day.

  “Oh, Lex! I knew it. You’ve worked it through. I told you if you just stuck at it, things would look brighter soon. Didn’t I? How many times did I tell you?”

  “Seventeen including this one,” I said. “But listen—”

  “Keith?” my mum shouted. “Ke-ith! It’s Lexy. They’ve worked it out. She’s staying. We can go over for Christmas.”

  “Mum!”

  My dad lifted the dining room extension. I could see him, bent over the table working on his fishing flies.

  “There!” he said. “What did we tell you? Every marriage has a few bumps in the early days, but you work them through.”

  “Dad. Mum. I’m divorced. It’s final. He is remarried to his first wife. I’m sorry about Christmas and the pool and the side-trip to Vegas. Although, nothing is stopping you going to Vegas for Christmas, you know.”

  “Now why would you get our hopes up?” said my mum. “What are you playing at now?”

  “As I was saying: a change of plan. I’m stopping on a for a bit to help out a friend—”

  “You’ve met someone else!” said my mum.

  “What’s his name?” said my dad. “Another dentist?”

  “She’s a retired pyrotechnician,” I said. The pronoun stopped them both dead. “She’s a former client and a friend. Well, actually maybe she’s a current client if I’m sticking around a while, so I probably shouldn’t say any more. She’s a recent widow. Very recent widow. And she needs some help with some … things.”

  “And as long as you’re there you can spend a bit of time with Branston,” my mother said. “See if you can’t iron out some of your differences, eh?”

  There was a sharp rap at the door of Room 213. It sounded like Roger. He sounded cross again. But Roger pissed off with me was infinitely preferable to my mum and her fantasies, so I opened up. It was Plainclothes Mike and Mills of God, the uniformed cop.