“But they’re out of season so what did you order?”
“I ordered frozen mashed persimmons, of course,” Lucinda said. “Are you going to talk about the electronic initiative?”
“I’m only going to ask for ideas about the memorial cere— What?” said Visalia, saving me from looking crass by asking the same.
“Serpentina told us about it when she came yesterday,” Lucinda said. “Now you know I don’t like to cross the line between work and family, Mrs. Bombaro, but I didn’t think it was the time. No one here was ready to listen to new ideas yesterday. Of course, it would be very different coming from you, but even today I wondered if perhaps it might be too early.”
“Lucinda, my dear, you can’t overstep the line between work and family; you are family,” Visalia said. “What electronic initiative?”
“To replace factory jobs with machines?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.
“To replace fireworks with lightbulbs,” Lucinda said. “To replace gunpowder with electricity.”
“What?” said Visalia. She sank down into the chair opposite Lucinda and looked her very steadily in the face. “You’re telling me,” she said, “that my niece was here yesterday talking about scrapping fireworks and making lightbulbs instead?”
“She touched on it,” said Lucinda. “Amongst other things.”
“Such as?”
“She told everyone not to pass idle gossip on to the police. She said we owed you our loyalty no matter how sad and angry we were and that Bombaro’s needed continuity and containment if we were to weather this scandal and transition into our new form without the loss of any jobs.”
I worked my jaw, trying to get back the power of speech, and I saw Vi doing the same. She looked like a carp who’d jumped out of its tank. Fish! I thought, fleetingly, but before I could find a pen to add a tiny ink fish friend for my regular-sized ink fish, Vi recovered.
“Serpentina said loyalty was key, because if I got nailed for Boom’s murder everyone would lose their jobs while she did what she’s dead set on doing?”
“’At’s about the size of it, Miss V,” said a new voice. I looked up and saw a factory foreman. He might as well have being wearing a sign. He was a squat little barrel of a man, with the brawny forearms of someone who mended large machines mid-shift to keep the production line rolling, the thick misshapen fingers of someone who didn’t always go about it the orthodox way, and the missing thumb of someone who, at least once, hadn’t switched off the machine before piling in. He had a pencil behind his ear and a red spotted handkerchief sticking out of his trouser pocket and when he sat down with a grunt on the fourth leatherette chair, he gave out a puff of perfume that was a cocktail of WD40, fried onions, and the sweat of honest toil.
“Now, I didn’t stay married all these years by listening to womenfolk when they start in on all that pansy-ass nonsense,” said the foreman. He spoke companionably, as if we might welcome his words. “But she got my attention, let me tell you.”
“And how did it go down with the sparklers?” said Visalia. She turned to me. “We call the guys and gals who work the production line our sparklers. It started out it was just the softball team—the Scrapping Sparklers—but we were so small in the early days most everyone in the factory was on the team, or cheerleading, or doing snack duty … and it stuck. Or spread. It spread and then it stuck.” It sounded gross. “Gather them, Lucinda,” said Vi. “I’ll be there in a few.”
Lucinda went back into her office and after another monster nose-blow she announced over the kind of tannoy I hadn’t seen since Grease that Mrs. Bombaro had arrived to say a few words and could everyone please gather in the cafeteria where Lana and Bertha (I think) were serving refreshments.
“I don’t know what she was thinking!” said Vi, once the salt of the earth with no time for womenfolk and their nonsense had lumbered off cafeteria-wards. “How could she do that? Why would she?”
“I can think of one reason,” I said. “It’s a brilliant double-bluff.”
Mizz Visalia gave me a quizzical look over the top of her powder compact—she was dusting her nose with the sort of pink powder you have to send away for these days.
“If Serpentina and the Dolshikov contingent killed Clovis,” I said, “the dumbest next move would be for them to reveal they had a plan for after he was gone.”
“You think his own niece killed him?”
“I think at least that she married his rival and she didn’t want him to know.”
“I always talked him out of sending someone down to Dallas to see what they were up to,” she said. “I thought it would kill him. Now I think I helped kill him anyway. If he had known about Sparky and Jan, he would have been forewarned.”
“Send someone down to … You mean like a spy?”
“We don’t call them spies.”
“But they’re real?”
“We don’t talk about it.”
“Visalia, for God’s sake. You do want this murder solved, don’t you? If the firework business really has honest-to-God spies, the police should know.”
“This she agrees they should know!” said Miss Vi to the ceiling. “They should know everything, Lexy. They should know about the Poggios, certainly.”
I tried to smile instead of sighing, but the sigh came out anyway and whistled down the sides of my teeth like a Welsh curse.
“I’ll tell them,” I said. “I promise. There’s something else I want to mention to Mike anyway. Nothing to do with this case, just something that came up in the place where I’m staying.”
“Oh?” said Vi.
“And nothing for you to worry about either,” I told her. “You’ve got enough on your plate. Are you sure you’re up to this speech?”
Mizz Vi gave me a look of steely dignity, her eyes a lot more Bette Davis than Garfield now. “My family needs me, Lexy,” she said. “It’s the Bombaro way.”
Fourteen
She was a marvel. There were about one hundred and fifty “sparklers” gathered in the cafeteria, half of them women in white coats and hairnets, a third of them men in blue overalls and work boots, the rest in shirts and ties or skirts and blouses, with either the slightly deranged smiles of sales staff or the absolutely deranged smiles of pyrotechnicians, who were the twitchiest bunch of misfits I have ever seen gathered together anywhere they might get their hands on matches. I sidled away from them and I didn’t care if they saw me.
All of them, hairnets to twitchers, had been or were now crying, although no one else reached the heights of extravagant grief that Lucinda had scaled. But all of them rallied as Vi addressed them.
“We will go on,” she said. “We will survive. But first we will give my dear husband the send-off he deserves. I will put a book of— What’s that? Of course. Lucinda has already put a book of condolence in each of the locker-rooms and the sales office and any messages you want to enter there will form part of the ceremony. Bubba and the boys will start working on a show for his funeral. I will take personal responsibility for clearance from the fire marshal. My dear Cousin Clovis knew very well that he would not be buried in a cemetery plot, since there was no way we could get permits for a pyrotechnic show worthy of his memory in a graveyard. It will be the last Bombaro family celebration at the Creek House. It is what he wanted and I agreed. And he will not just be the honoree of the display we design in his memory, he will be a part of the show. We must of course work to fulfill our orders, but when Bubba and the boys decide what they need, anyone who works overtime to build the stock will be paid double and will be in my prayers of thanks. I thank you all, my family, for being here to help me say goodbye and send our dearest Clovis on his final journey.”
In other words, if I caught her drift, Clovis’s ashes were going to be sprinkled into a bunch of fireworks like so much goldfish food (FISH, Lexy!) and he was going to be blasted into
the sky. Shame I’d miss the funeral.
And the twitchy guys were under the command of someone called Bubba.
“Now,” said Mizz Vi, after she had taken a sip of tea and a bite of muffin, and dabbed her lips, “does anyone have any questions?”
“What about the lightbulbs?” said a timid voice from somewhere in the middle of the crowd.
Visalia’s face turned icy and her eyes flashed.
“I will be taking up that topic with my niece and her connections this very day,” she said. “Be assured that Bombaro’s will continue to be the biggest and best firework manufacturer and the most innovative and exciting provider of pyrotechnic displays in this country. No forty-watt bulb is going to change that.”
There was a rousing cheer and even Lucinda managed a smile; watery and accompanied by a hiccup, but still a smile.
“Who did it, Mizz Visalia?” came another voice, just a bit bolder.
“Who would harm that man?” someone else chipped in.
“I will be taking up that topic too,” said Mizz Vi. There was a rustle of shocked whispers as it sank home. She suspected her niece!
“Now before I go,” Mizz Visalia said, “there’s one more thing you can do for me. Cast your minds back and see if there’s anything suspicious—anything at all—that you think the detectives should know. Anyone hanging around, anything Mr. Bombaro said, anything out of the ordinary. Anything you heard on the grapevine. Any little thing whatsoever that might possibly be useful information to the police—you march right down there and tell them. Now I know how busy you all are with your home lives and your families, so you have my permission to take time out of the working day if you need to go. You don’t have to sign off. This, after all, is the greatest work you’ll ever do for the Bombaro family.”
The squat foreman rumbled a bit at that but everyone else in the room immediately got very concentrated looks on their faces. And who could blame them? They’d just been given a free pass by the boss to bunk off work and go swanning down to Cuento if they felt like it. I’m sure lots of them really wanted to tell the cops about shady characters lurking at the factory gates and veiled hints dropped by Clovis in his last days, but some of them—at least a few of them—would be thinking about pedicures and matinees.
“And,” I said, stepping forward, “if anyone needs to talk, my name is Lexy, and I’m a qualified counsellor. I’ll be here for the rest of the morning.” Mizz Visalia turned and stared at me, but what was she going to do? She could hardly argue. “I’m going to sit right here and if anyone wants a quiet word or advice about techniques in dealing with grief, just come and see me.”
I thought I saw a few of the women tear up and start to sniffle in preparation for spending the rest of their shift sitting on their behinds in the cafeteria chewing the fat with me instead of working.
“Thank you, Lexy,” said Mizz Visalia as I helped her down from the makeshift podium of pallets where we’d both been standing. “I want them to feel part of this and I want them to know I’m thinking of their pain and loss as well as my own.”
I nodded. Truly, California is nothing like Dundee. If a factory boss in Dundee died, the workers would wonder whether to send flowers or just a card. And if they sent flowers, it would be because that way there didn’t have to be a poem.
“Anytime,” I said.
“But once you’re done,” said Visalia, “will you come back to the house? I want someone there when I tackle Sparky. And Father Adam has declined. He hasn’t been the support I was expecting.”
“I’d be happy to,” I lied. “But can I just ask this? What makes you so sure it’s Sparky and not Boing-Boing or the other Dolshikovs?”
“Bang-Bang,” said Mizz Vi. “That’s a very good question. I can’t honestly say. It’s no more than a hunch, I guess.”
“Well, don’t ignore it,” I said. “I’m a firm believer in the power of the hunch. Don’t let her get you alone.”
Visalia had been girding herself for a dramatic exit, tweaking her scarf and shifting her hanky round to a clean bit, ready for waving, but that stopped her dead in her tracks. She stood gawping at me. “Do you think I’m in danger?”
“Do you think you’re not?” I came back with. “If Sparky killed her uncle to get control of the company and run it into the ground, leaving the way clear for the Dolshikovs, aren’t you in her way? Who inherits the business anyway?”
“Me,” said Mizz Vi, in a breathless kind of voice. “But … ”
“But nothing,” I said. “You were surprised by how quick they got here, weren’t you? Well, if they knew in advance he’d died, that would certainly give them a head start.”
“I need a nap,” said Vi, and she sounded as if she really did.
“Lock your door, punch in 911 to your phone, and leave it handy,” I said.
“Oh dear,” she whimpered. “Oh dear.”
“Look, get Lucinda or that foreman guy to take you home, eh?” I said. I was beginning to feel like a bit of a brute for not offering, but I did so very much want to make the most of being here in the factory while I could.
Visalia nodded. But funny thing—as I was setting up my grief-
counselling corner just a few minutes later, I caught a glimpse of her striding across the car park back towards the gates where a cab was waiting. She looked tip-top and raring to go.
I watched her until the cab was gone, then I went back to fiddling with the window catch, which was why I was standing there in the first place. It was one of the hardest things to get used to in my new life: shutting the windows when it was hot instead of opening them. It drove Branston nuts during our short bout of wedded bliss. I’d leave the bathroom window open to clear the steam and the bedroom window open to freshen the room and then I’d forget. It was the suburbs and, my whole life, the only reasons I’d ever closed a window was for security in a dodgy area and to stop horizontal rain coming in. In this neighbourhood, under a blazing blue sky, I was trying to change the habits of a lifetime and failing.
And anyway it wouldn’t have been so bad in a house with a few bloody doors. As it was, we’d come through from the garage, and the heat would paff us is in face like a big fart. There was no mistaking it. Then Bran would groan and I would apologize and then he’d sigh and I’d tell him to get over it and remind him that the air-conditioning would have all four of our nipples on parade in ten minutes flat. And then he’d lecture me about carbon emissions. And I’d ask him whether ten minutes of air-conditioning was really worse than him changing every stitch he wore every day, trousers included, and taking two clean towels—one big, one wee—for his two daily showers and washing it all in a machine the size of my first flat and then tumble-drying it instead of hanging it in out in the sunshine that made him sweat enough for the clothes change and the two showers in the first place.
It was a failure of a marriage in most respects, but we really had managed to get in a full lifetime’s worth of bickering.
I turned at a polite cough behind me. There were two of the hairnet women standing there.
“Hi,” I said. “Sit down. Can I get you a cup of tea?”
“What? Why?” said one.
“It’s all right, Darla,” said the other one. “She just means ‘Hello’.” She turned to me. “I watch a lot of Masterpiece Theatre. I understand your ways.”
“So,” I said, “how can I help you?”
“It’s the lightbulbs,” said the TV fan. “It’s gotten out of hand and we think you should know—we think Mrs. B should know—what really went on.”
“And what was that?” I said.
“Sparky didn’t mean to suggest she was shutting production or moving away from pyrotechnics,” Darla said. “All she meant was that she had been developing a second string and she was determined to see it through even without his know-how and guiding hand. We thought it was a good idea, didn’t
we, CeeCee?”
CeeCee nodded. “Light shows, Sparky said. Drought-compliant light shows to get round the city, county, and state restrictions until it rains again. And—this is the real smart part—light shows could get permits for venues that firework shows would never be allowed in. National parks, residential neighborhoods, historic monuments … ”
“What historic monuments?” I asked. About an hour’s drive away there was a flat rock where native people used to grind acorns and they’d drawn some pictures on it with a sharpened stick. But no one would want to set off fireworks there, surely.
“Like the gardens at the Crutchley house on D street,” said CeeCee. “It’s a wedding venue but there are no fireworks there because it’s historic.”
“It is?”
“1870,” she said, nodding.
“Of course,” I said. “Well, that sounds pretty clever actually. I’ve seen one. There’s one in a forest in Scotland every winter and it’s pretty cool and a lot less alarming than a pyrotechnic show. Especially for the deer.”
“Right, wildlife. That’s another thing,” CeeCee said.
“So … this is going to sound strange,” I said, “but how come you understood it and everyone else has got the wrong end of the stick?”
“Oh,” said Darla. “Well … ” I looked around for eavesdroppers but the lunch ladies were busy behind the counter, a long way from where the three of us sat, and the cooling fans that were working against the heat of the ovens were basically great big white noise machines.
“Everything you say to me is in the strictest confidence,” I said. “I’ve got client confidentiality that covers all counselling sessions.”
“Is this a counseling session?” said CeeCee.
“How did you feel when you heard about the murder?” I asked.
“Awful!” said Darla.
“It is now.” I smiled at them. “So?”
“Well, we overheard her practising what she was going to say to Chucky Cheese.”
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