Scot Free

by Catriona McPherson

  When the doyenne answered the door, I twigged: this was plantation architecture and the woman standing before me with a meringue of pink-blonde hair and the strange, mottled-tuna look of a face-lift was a bona fide Southern Belle. She was about Visalia’s age too, and I felt sure she’d have tales to tell me.

  “That poor dear sweet soul,” said the neighbour lady. She had told me her name was Dorabelle. “She and I have been friends for sixty years. We were living here already when Clovis and Visalia first came. When the little old house was there? They were beside themselves to be owners of property. It was the cutest thing! And here we still are, all these years later! They did so well for themselves and made a fine life. They threw some of the prettiest parties. Once poor Visalia learned how it was done.”

  I was nodding with a fixed grin plastered on my face. It was the best I could do. Dorabelle was a humungous snob. I only hoped (and felt pretty sure) that she’d be a gossip as well and that seeing poor sweet little Visalia suffer the social blow of a murder—my dear!—she’d relish the chance to chew it over, even with the likes of me. I was right; she invited me in for tea.

  “Were you here the day he died?” I asked. “Did you see anything?”

  “Well now,” said Dorabelle. “I see nothing from spring to fall. Once the leaves are on the mimosa and the buckeye over there, why I’m just in a perfect bower! I’m in a forest glade. And sometimes it seems that sweet Visalia and poor dear Clovis … Well, they forget that I’m so close and hear so clearly. And of course, being Italian, they’re so very … unguarded. Don’t you always think so? I don’t mean to say that I am a cold-hearted woman. Why no. The women of my family are as vivacious as anyone I ever met. But we place a high value on decorum.”

  I murmured, encouragingly. A small section of my brain was wondering if I could get her to say an actual fiddle-di-dee.

  “Why, if I was of a mind,” Dorabelle said, coyly, “I could tell you things about Clovis and Visalia that no one but no one should know.”

  I cast my mind back over the seven full seasons of True Blood I had watched in the post-Branston doldrums and everything I could dredge up from Whatshername in The Golden Girls.

  “You don’t say,” I breathed for starters.

  But that was plenty. Dorabelle set down her tea glass and scooted forward so that I was looking right down her powdery cleavage.

  “Eighty-six years old and they still fought like newlyweds,” she said. “Slamming doors, firing good dishes like cannonballs. Why, that woman doesn’t have a single piece of her wedding china left to her name. And the language that flew through the air? My late husband could cuss up a blue storm like any Texas man. If the cards fell bad or the well went dry, he could shrivel a peach blossom. But not once in fifty-three years of wedded bliss did he raise his voice or use a foul word to me. Once—one time!—I had a little fender-bender in his Caddy and he told me I was careless. ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘I won’t be so careless as to share my bed with a man who talks to me that way.’ I spoke very quietly and walked away very slowly. Six weeks later he gave me an emerald necklace and begged me to be friends again.” She sighed and stroked her throat, remembering the necklace, or maybe the friendliness.

  “I tried to teach Visalia to deal with Clovis in the same way—like my mother taught me—but even as late as this spring, when she caught him sending flowers to one of his lady friends, I heard her—all the windows wide open!—‘Filthy pig’ she called him. ‘I should turn the’—I can’t say the next word, dear, my daddy would come back and haunt me but—‘turn the hm-hm hose on you, you pork-oh shi-foso!’ I just can’t imagine what that means. Can you?”

  “Italian for filthy pig, I think,” I said, which disappointed her greatly.

  “And then lately,” she went on, “and this will tickle you like a goose feather, they’ve been in counseling! Can you believe it? Counseling, at eighty-six! You could have rolled me in panko and called me a fishstick when Visalia told me.”

  “Fish!” I said. I was using a plain old ballpoint, not a Sharpie, but I drew an outline on my hand with it.

  “Go to the Nugget,” said Dorabelle. “Theirs is freshest.”

  “And did the counselling make a difference?”

  “Oh, honey!” said Dorabelle. “It certainly did. Now instead of ‘I’ma-gonna kill you, you bitch’ and ‘You should be spinning on a barbecue, you pig’ it was ‘You’re revisiting past issues, you bitch’ and ‘Use eye statements, you pig.’ Whatever in the world eye statements might be.”

  I didn’t think it was worth explaining.

  “One night, my Friends of the Library reading group discussed not one single word of Pudd’nhead Wilson. We were agog. Lined up on the terrace with our martinis—just agog.”

  “And on the last day?” I said. “Were they arguing then?”

  “Oh, honey!” said Dorabelle. “That last day? I could have sold tickets and popcorn.”

  “Really?” I said. “They were at it right to the end?” I was feeling kind of sick. I had only come to the neighbours looking for disgruntled combatants in hedge wars. What I was finding out was that Visalia’s story of truce and reconciliation, a second honeymoon in Sicily, a golden future in the lemon groves of home was so much …

  “… cornswaggle,” Dorabelle was saying. I gathered my attention and gave it back to her. “There was no end. If they had stopped arguing, I might have worried about them. If they had stopped arguing, they might have been headed for the divorce court at last. But they were their same old selves. ‘Stop seeing her, you pig!’ and ‘A man has needs, you bitch!’ And then I heard the garage door and someone driving away and then … ”

  “And then?”

  “And then the next thing I knew was police and ambulances and a news helicopter and those tacky reporters knocking on my door and asking their questions. Could I see into the house from my property and would I accept a thousand dollars to let them in with their zoom lenses. My grandmother LaFytte would spin in her coffin if I ever did anything so trashy.”

  “Plus you can’t see a thing when the leaves are on,” I reminded her.

  “Honey, I know! I was up in my sewing nook, with my opera glasses, standing on a chair and I couldn’t even see the blue lights flashing.”

  “Mizz Dorabelle?” I said. I had glanced at my watch and I only had five minutes to get back round the block for Vi. “Who do you think killed him?”

  She set her tea glass down and put a hand up to her neck. “Child,” she said, “I am so glad you asked me that.”

  “Was it one of the neighbours?”

  “What? No. Why? No. Who? No, of course not.”

  It seemed like a no on that one.

  “I tried to tell the police, but they wouldn’t listen to me,” she said.

  “I’m listening,” I told her.

  “Well, Clovis ran a very successful business,” she said. “And running a business is not like running a day-care center. A good businessman has to make hard decisions and stick to them. A good businessman doesn’t rise to the top without making enemies on the way.” She sat back as if she had told me everything I could possibly want to know.

  “Can you be any more specific?”

  “I wish I could, honey,” she said, “but unfortunately if you’re looking around this once-great country of ours for someone too lazy to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, you don’t need a spyglass.”

  “Umm?” I said.

  “I think Clovis Bombaro was probably killed by one of his former employer’s, sacked for incompetence, laughed out of court when he tried to sue for wrongful dismissal, and determined to make Clovis pay somehow.”

  “Well … ” I said.

  “You see,” said Dorabelle, “the trouble with these people is that they sit around their apartments watching their flatscreen TVs and letting their children run wild and they
just get angrier and angrier. They think life owes them a living and they just won’t take responsibility for their own poor decisions. And they have to resort to violence, oftentimes, to settle their differences because they don’t speak English, you see.”

  I had lost my smile a while back and now I fought an eye roll. “Is there one in particular?” I asked her.

  “Oh honey!” said Dorabelle. “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. They’re all the same. But, like I said, the police didn’t want to know. Politically incorrect, I suppose. So a cold-blooded murderer walks free.”

  I got out of there. I couldn’t see a handy stick lying around anywhere in her immaculate gardens, so I didn’t actually scrape her words off me with it. I contented myself with a thorough snort before I got back in my car.

  Then, for the sake of the investigation, I tried to be objective. I would certainly ask Visalia about the state of labour relations at the firework factory. I had thought myself that the method suggested an insider. I shouldn’t dismiss Dorabelle’s intuitions out of hand just because she was a rancid old horror who made Scarlet O’Hara look like a hippie.

  Thirteen

  Your neighbour over the back’s a bit of a one, isn’t she?” I said to Mizz Vi, minutes later. I had found her sitting in the foyer looking like she’d been sent to the headmaster’s study for passing notes. The house was silent around her, no sign of any beloved relatives beyond a golf bag hooked over the finial at the bottom of the stairs. “I got lost in these winding streets,” I said, “and she put me right. In more ways than one.”

  “Dorabelle?” said Vi. “She’s lived there since before Cousin Clovis and I first arrived. Queen of the neighborhood. And then when Willard went to jail, she hung on by the skin of her teeth taking in paying guests and pretending they were relations.”

  “Wait, stop, what? Who’s Willard?”

  “Her husband. He did hard time for running a sweatshop.”

  “Ahhhh,” I said. “Well, that explains a lot. She reckoned one of Clovis’s employees probably killed him because he expected them to lift a finger for their salary.”

  “That sounds like Dora!”

  “I take it you’ve got no suspicions in that quarter then?”

  “Cousin Clovis ran a union shop,” said Visalia. “Spons a lid a lee off a dendle, you name it. I never told Dorabelle because I didn’t want to rub her nose in it, but those are the facts.”

  “A union shop,” I said. “A lid, eh? Dendle.” I had no idea what the hell she meant by any of it, but I didn’t want to tell her. If she found out that I knew precisely fi-diddly-squit about factories, she might decide she’d be better off taking someone else along today.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Can I visit the powder room before we set off?” I asked, and once I was ensconced in a little grotto of onyx and jade with dolphin taps and a gold-lamé bog-seat cover, I phoned Todd.

  “Translation, please,” I said.

  “Have you fallen down a well?” he said.

  “I’m hiding in a bathroom and I haven’t got all day. Listen, what does running a union shop mean? What would you be doing if you sponsed a lid and a lee off a dendle?”

  “What? A union shop is a—what the hell are you asking me? A union shop is exactly what it says, where all the workers are in a labor union. But the rest of it is garbage.”

  “I’m just telling you what someone told me, Todd. Spons a lid, a lee, off a dendle. Is it like code that shop stewards would know?”

  “Shop stewards?”

  “The guys in charge of the union.”

  “Labor organizers. Spons a lid, spons a lee, offed a dend OH MY GOD!”

  I took the phone away from my ears just in time to stop my eardrum exploding and spraying my blood all over the onyx and jade. Todd was whooping and shrieking so loud the line was cracking up.

  “Todd? What is it? Is it the insects? Have they got out? Are you okay?”

  When he calmed down to a moderate eleven from his initial hundred and fifty, I realized he was laughing. When I listened closely to the laughter I realized he was laughing at me.

  “Is it possible that this person said ‘sponsored little league and offered dental’? That would go with a labor union.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “What does it mean?”

  “What do you mean, what does it mean? It means they sponsor little league and offer dental.”

  I waited.

  “It means they put up the money for small children to play baseball competitively and they include dentistry in their healthcare plan. Wow, Lexy. I mean, wow.”

  “What? I’m not stupid. I just … listen, you’re not stupid, but you didn’t know what a shop steward was.”

  “I knew it was two words and that they were ‘shop’ and ‘steward.’ Do you want me to come help? Where are you anyway?”

  “I’ll manage, thank you,” I said. And even to my own ears I sounded prissy. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Wait, Lexy!” said Todd. “Before you go. Cindy Slagle came to look at the you-know-whats.”

  “That was quick.”

  “She’s a big fan of Roger’s. Whatever it was he called her in for that time, she got two papers and a conference in Cairo out of it.’

  “And did she know what they are?’

  “Were,” said Todd. “They’re dead.”

  “Costa Rican insecticide strikes again?”

  “No need,” he said. “They all just died. They were dead when Cindy went in. They couldn’t survive without a host.”

  “What? What the hell were they?”

  “Anoplura. Parasites. But here’s the really interesting thing. Cindy was absolutely stumped about how they got there. There’s no way in the world they could have gotten there. And yet there they were. She was like a kid in a candy store. Of course, I didn’t see this, but Nolly reported back. Cindy took about a million photographs and then resealed the bathroom and asked if we’d leave it so she could bring back a couple of grad students.”

  “And can she?”

  “Noleen said she would rather bake the dead Anoplura in a pie and eat it with booger ice-cream.”

  “How did Professor Slagle take that?”

  “She’s okay. She’ll get another paper anyway with what she’s got. Noleen went in and cleaned the place out. Good as new, she said.”

  I grimaced. “It’ll still be a while before she can rent out the room, though.”

  “Hah!” said Todd. “There’s a couple of kids on a budget honeymoon trip in there now. They asked in the office for extra bubble bath and an ice bucket too, so they’re definitely making full use of the place.”

  I grimaced with a hard swallow. “God, I hope the little shits really are dead. Look, Todd, I’ve got to go. I’ll speak to you later, okay?”

  “Tummy trouble?” said Mizz Vi, when I got back to the foyer. I had been gone a long time, I supposed.

  “Time of the month,” I said, rubbing my belly down low and grimacing.

  “Oh, I don’t miss all that,” she said. “The menopause was the best thing that ever happened to me. The last thirty years have been the best years of my life.”

  I nodded, slowly, trying to make that little remark fit the overall picture of a marriage of flying plates and a sudden gruesome start to her widowhood. She was looking into one of the outsize mirrors, fussing with a chiffon scarf.

  “Is this too much?” she said. “I don’t want to look as if I’m enjoying it, but I want to look respectful.”

  She was wearing sleeveless lavender-grey crepe and Tahitian pearls. In other words, mother-of-the-bride, if the bride died on the way to the church and was getting buried instead of married.

  “You look perfect,” I said. “And there really won’t be any fireworks?”

  “Non
e at all,” said Mizz Vi. “Ready?”

  I had been expecting something like the toy factory from Toys or the chocolate factory from Charlie, but the firework factory, just off the causeway on the road to Sacramento, could have been manufacturing safety caps for medicine bottles or grip strips to join carpets together for all the pizzazz it showed on the outside. Not a single fountain, wrought iron starburst, or even exclamation mark hinted at what was going on inside. There was only a sober white sign proclaiming Bombaro (LLC) Manufacturing Please report at reception and a gate in a chain link fence leading to a car park full of modest, middle-aged sedans in front of a modest, middle-aged breezeblock building with a black tissue-paper rosette affixed to the door. Long story short, it looked a lot more like a morgue than the morgue.

  “Oh!” said Mizz Vi. “That’s a nice touch, isn’t it? I’ll bet that was Lucinda. She’s been Cousin Clovis’s personal secretary for forty-five years. She had silver and then gold ribbons for the big anniversaries and a yellow ribbon up when he came back to work after his gallstones. She’ll be destroyed! Absolutely destroyed.”

  She was. The woman who met us just inside the reception foyer doors was a walking wreck. Her eyes were sodden, her lips swollen, her cheeks pale, her nose red. Her voice was a crow’s croak and her walk a drunk’s totter.

  “Oh, Mrs. Bombaro!” she said and dissolved into a fresh flood of tears, sinking onto one of the chairs in the little waiting area and sobbing there.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Lucinda,” said Vi. “Why not take the day off?”

  Lucinda blew her nose, volcanically, and then dropped the tissue into a waste basket. We heard it hit the bottom. “Where else would I be?” she said. “How could I?” She sniffed, pretty much as if the nose-blow hadn’t happened, and then shifted gears. “I’ve told the floor bosses and the office managers that you’re coming in. I’ve had all the extra chairs set out in the cafeteria and the lunch staff have prepared iced tea and muff-muff-muff-”

  “Cousin Clovis tasted the morning muffins personally every day,” Mizz Vi explained.

  “His favourite was pers-pers-pers-” said Lucinda.