Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last

by David Steven Rappoport

  Husbands and Lap Dogs

  Breathe Their Last

  A Cummings Flynn Wanamaker Mystery

  David Steven Rappoport

  Mainly Murder Press, LLC

  PO Box 290586

  Wethersfield, CT 06129-0586

  www.mainlymurderpress.com

  Mainly Murder Press

  Editor: Judith K. Ivie

  Cover Designer: Karen A. Phillips

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Copyright 2016 by David Steven Rappoport

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-9861780-3-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-0-9861780-4-7

  Published in the United States of America by

  Mainly Murder Press, LLC

  PO Box 290586

  Wethersfield, CT 06129-0586

  www.MainlyMurderPress.com

  Dedication

  To my husband, Tim Tucker, who is kind, dependable,

  and the only man I know who conducts

  volumetric analyses of birthday cake

  ~

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Donald Laventhall for his generous assistance and to the following people who have been very helpful to the development of this book or to my progress as a mystery writer: Laurie Bernstein, Dan Duffy, Keith Green, Michael Klein, Jeff Kliment, Paul Rivenberg, Rebecca Robinson, Howard Solomon, Jennifer Stevenson, Todd Young, and Wendell Wyatt. Thanks to Marie Gross for the legal advice. I’d also like to thank the primary members of my Nordic study group for their support: Christopher Dork, Kate Early, and Rowan Hendrix.

  Finally, for offering inspiration, I’d like to acknowledge The Owen Society for Hermetic and Spiritual Enlightenment, information about which can be found at www.facebook.com/groups/365219873490214.

  ~

  Then flash’d the living lightning from her eyes,

  And screams of horror rend th’ affrighted skies.

  Not louder shrieks to pitying Heav’n are cast,

  When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last...

  Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

  ~

  Chapter One

  Mainers take care of what they own; the weather and Yankee frugality demand it. When winter comes, they put their boats in dry dock and often shrink-wrap them in white plastic. When summer approaches, they rip the shrink-wrap off and put them back in the water.

  It was early June in the village of Horeb, Maine, population 2,421, a village on Merrymeeting Bay. The weather had finally turned warm, and Elektra Philemon, with the assistance of three local boys, was about to launch her employer’s boat for the season. It was stored at a neighbor’s place — Ernestine Cutter’s. Ernestine knew that in recent years the dock and storage fees at the town marina had become too much for Deuteronomy Smelt, the man for whom Elektra worked as a housekeeper.

  Elektra was a monumental woman in late middle age, part Praxiteles and part Bride of Frankenstein, with more curves than a Greek island and a headful of frantic gray ringlets. She strode forcefully in her L.L. Bean waterproof boots across the acres of garden, septic system and muddy meadow that separated Ernestine’s Greek Revival home from the bay. The leach field was particularly soft; major repairs had been done in the fall and covered over with earth just before winter set in.

  As Elektra and her helpers approached, they noticed an increasingly foul smell. By the time they reached the boat, the smell was overwhelming. The shrink-wrapping, while still more or less intact around the sides of the boat, had a large gash on the surface.

  “A fisher cat must have crawled in there and died,” one of the boys suggested, referring to a nasty species of local weasel.

  Elektra sighed and nodded in agreement. “Boys, we rip the plastic, then back to the house for bleach I going, and the boat we scrub.”

  Vigorously, she began to rend the white plastic that covered the boat like a cocoon. The boys assisted.

  The cause of the smell was not immediately evident, so Elektra hoisted herself into the boat and looked inside the interior. Entering the front cabin, she shrieked monumentally. She climbed down to terra firma and fell to her knees, shaking her fists.

  “What is it?” one of the boys asked.

  She wailed. Startled by her behavior, the boys expressed fear in its more subdued Yankee form: they stood frozen. Then one of the boys, returning more quickly than his peers to his normal state of New England pragmatism, went on board to see what the problem was.

  “So, is it a fisher cat?” one of his friends asked.

  “No. It’s a person.”

  The second boy joined the first in the boat. “Who is that?” he asked, peering at the remains.

  “Don’t know, but he looks wicked dead,” the first boy said.

  “Somebody should call Officer Bernier,” a third boy concluded, referring to the Sagadahoc County Sheriff who lived in the village. This boy pulled a cell phone out of his pocket.

  Elektra wailed again, then added, “Ask police if bringing some bleach!”

  Chapter Two

  Cummings Flynn Wanamaker was the result of five centuries of cynics, rabbis, radicals and unclassifiable odd balls from unremarkable portions of Eastern Europe. The family name, Wachinsky, had been changed at Ellis Island.

  Cummings had dark brown hair and eyes, stood 5’8”, but only when he was really trying, and had a tendency toward ovoid pudginess, which had become more and more difficult to control as the years passed. Like most short, chubby people, he longed to be tall and thin, or at least young, short and less chubby. His IQ was high, very high, but not so high as to result in actual genius. He was pleased with the wisdom that living to the age of fifty had afforded him; he often thought that if he could repackage his current knowledge in his twenty-year-old body, life would be optimal.

  Cummings had a craving for the certainty of perfection. Outside of his detective work, an arena in which he was able to channel this tendency into discernment, he rarely seemed to be able to identify the perfect choice in a set of possibilities.

  Some years earlier he’d implemented a reasonably effective workaround. He set the timer on his wristwatch for thirty minutes, during which he allowed himself to consider all options. Then he willed himself to make a selection or, failing that, a choice at random.

  Earlier in the day Cummings had spent two hours on the Internet searching for unusual cocktails. When he had reduced the list to twenty-seven possibilities, he set the timer. Thirty minutes later, when a buzzer sounded, he was no closer to a decision. He closed his eyes and pointed at random to make a selection.

  Now Cummings and his husband, Odin, along with their neighbors and best friends, Luther and Rockland, sat in Odin’s and Cummings’s Chicago living room, sipping the selected drink, a flaming concoction called The Burning Witch of Aragon.

  The house was a bungalow, an Arts and Crafts cottage built in 1916, one of thousands of similar homes that fill Chicago’s neighborhoods. On the first floor there was a tiny living room, tiny dining room, two small bedrooms (one of which was Odin’s office and one of which was Cummings’s) and a cramped kitchen.

  Although the house was more suitable for dolls than people, it was charmin
g. The first floor was embellished with stained glass, oak moldings and built-in oak cabinets. A friend of Odin’s who, unlike Odin and Cummings, had a talent for such things had decorated it using Mission colors and furniture. The second floor was even tinier than the first, little more than a half-story, with two small bedrooms and two smaller closets; but again the decor had transformed it into a domestic museum of World War I-era taste. Cummings liked the house but thought it was good that their social life was mostly limited to at-homes with Luther and Rockland; there wasn’t room for more.

  “What’s in this drink?” Rockland Yellowhair asked. He was of mixed American Indian and Nordic ancestry, with decidedly jet-black hair and blue eyes. He was in very late middle age and a bit like Fred Astaire—not truly handsome but tall, thin and elegant. He was rather formal and always seemed overdressed, even when he was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, as he was presently.

  “Sangria, vodka and a dash of hot sauce,” Cummings explained, blowing out the flame and taking a sip. “The recipe is from a bar in Madrid called Savonarola. Apparently, it has an Inquisition theme. They serve this drink with an appetizer called auto da fe-jitas.”

  “I cannot remember when I have tasted something so inflammatory,” Luther drawled languidly. He was a tall, thin, ethereal young man in his thirties with a delicate coffee-colored complexion and a neat Fade haircut that accentuated his tightly curled black hair. He was as southern as pecan pie, poisonous snakes and relatives hidden in the attic. Unlike Rockland, who only seemed to be overdressed, Luther usually was. Today he wore a white linen suit, a blue cotton shirt, a madras bow tie, wingtip shoes and a straw hat.

  “You know, you needn’t try so hard to impress,” Rockland said to Cummings, referring to the drink. “It’s only us.”

  “Cummings likes to entertain,” Odin said in husbandly defense. He was also of Nordic ancestry and was slim, tall and blond. He was in his mid-forties, had a goatee, and wore jeans and, as always, his prized University of Illinois baseball cap.

  “I don’t mind the effort,” Cummings replied, “though I did have some trouble narrowing the drink list.”

  “Let me know when you’re ready for a referral for your obsessive compulsive disorder. I may have retired from medicine, but I still have a Rolodex,” Rockland said.

  “I don’t have OCD,” Cummings protested. “It’s just that I sometimes have trouble sorting through options.”

  Cummings was fairly new to Chicago. After much of a lifetime in Manhattan, he had moved to the village of Horeb, Maine, population 2,600. He’d gone there following clues to the murder of his late partner, Terry. After several years this murder and quite a few others had been solved, and Maine’s rurality had begun to seem oppressive rather than peaceful.

  Cummings was thinking about moving on when he met Odin by chance while visiting Chicago. Cummings had been immediately attracted to Odin physically but even more intrigued by the fact that when he first saw him, Odin was making strange numeric doodles on a napkin.

  “Are you doing your taxes?” Cummings asked him.

  “No,” Odin responded.

  “Are you a mathematician?” Cummings tried again.

  “No. I’m a computer geek, but I love math. It’s one of the few areas of life where there’s almost always an answer. I thought I’d just have a beer and double-check my figures.”

  “I see. Do you mind if I ask what you’re calculating?”

  “Not at all. I’m working out how many dates I have to go on to get to Mister Right.”

  “Can you calculate that?” Cummings asked.

  “Well, you have to make some assumptions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Conceptually, it’s similar to socks in a drawer. Let’s say you have forty socks, all mixed up, half of which are black and half of which are white. In order to be sure you have a pair that matches, what’s the largest number you might have to pull out?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Correct. My challenge is to calculate the minimum number of socks I have to pull out of the drawer, metaphorically speaking, to be likely to get to a match. Are you really interested in this?”

  “Yes. Please continue,” Cummings replied.

  “The drawer is Cook County. The initial set of socks is the male population. According to the 2000 census, that’s 2,603,532. No one really knows what percentage of the population is gay and lesbian, but I’m using four percent, which is what the British government estimates. That works out to 104,141 gay men, of whom 29,159 are in my target age group, thirty-five to fifty-four.

  “The next question is, how many gay men are single? No one knows that either, but I found a large health-related survey in California in which twenty-five percent of gay men reported they were partnered. So, I’m going with seventy-five percent single. That drops the pool to 21,869. Next, I’m assuming that my matching sock has at least a bachelor’s degree and is a registered Democrat. Similar education and values are important, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That drops the pool to 4,301. At this point, things become trickier. In order to get down to anything like a manageable number of dates, I need to come up with other criteria that are quantifiable and will predict compatibility. Otherwise, to adequately sample my 4,300 guys, I’d have to go on something like 525 dates.”

  “So, what did you select?”

  “Just one question: What do you really want in life?”

  “Why did you pick that?”

  “Because my last partner didn’t know, and I think that’s what ultimately did us in.”

  “That’s not always easy to know,” Cummings said. “What you think is fulfilling can disappear, and then you’re left feeling like you’re starting all over from the beginning.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” Odin asked.

  “More or less. My partner was killed a few years ago. Murdered.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” Odin replied.

  “Thank you. And what about you?”

  “Do you mean, why am I single? My ex left me for an interior designer we met on vacation in Madrid.”

  “So, what percentage of men know what they want?” Cummings asked.

  “Anecdotally, based on my first hundred dates, I’d estimate twenty-five percent.”

  “That few?”

  “I’m afraid so. Anyway, that brings my sample down to 1,075. With a confidence of ninety-five percent plus or minus four percent, I still have to go out with around 385 men to sample the socks in the drawer.”

  “How many socks have you sampled so far?”

  “275.”

  Within a few minutes Cummings became datum 276. Within a few days it seemed clear to both of them that Cummings was the study end point, even though he’d appeared earlier than projected. They began dating long distance. Eighteen months later Cummings had moved to the Windy City. That was several months ago.

  “How’s work, Odin?” Luther said, tactfully changing the subject as he always did when Rockland’s assessment of Cummings’s compulsiveness came up. “Did I not read that Multiverse Air had a substantial first quarter loss?”

  “Yes, you did, though I don’t see how that makes it different from virtually every other corporation on earth,” Odin responded. Times were indeed tough. “They’re threatening layoffs. I think we’re safe in IT, though.”

  “I believe everybody I know is worried about their jobs,” Luther said, “except Rockland, of course, as he’s retired.”

  Rockland smiled.

  “Are you worried about your job, Luther?” Cummings asked Luther.

  “The music department is threatening cutbacks. Still, I have a backup plan. I believe I have mentioned my brother-in-law, Billy Goat Bates, who owns a Christian car wash in Tuscaloosa, Alabama? He has purchased a Hammond organ secondhand from a Pentecostal church that went into decline after the entire congregation died from snakebites. He would like me to play hymns for his customers while their vehi
cles are washed in the blood of the lamb, so to speak.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “And you, Cummings?” Luther asked with a wry smile. “I understand congratulations are in order.”

  “For what? Consulting is tough right now. I hardly have any work.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Luther responded, taking a neatly folded newspaper clipping from his coat pocket. It was an article from the previous day’s Chicago Tribune.

  “‘Another notable amateur Chicago sleuth is Cummings Flynn Wanamaker,’“ Luther read, “‘who helped the Joliet police solve a rash of murders there.’“

  “I don’t know how they found out about that,” Cummings said modestly.

  “Your business is struggling because you’re in the wrong business,” Rockland stated. “You should stop wasting your time working for charitable foundations and become a licensed detective.”

  “I’ve been getting calls, a few yesterday and three or four since this morning,” Cummings said.

  “Calls from whom?” Luther asked.

  “People who read the article and looked up my number. They’re looking for help solving mysteries.”

  “Well, there you are,” Rockland said emphatically, “and if you get any juicy cases, give me a jingle. I’m busy with my musicology research but can certainly give a toxicology consult for the odd poisoning.”

  “Thanks, Rockland. I’m still grateful to you and Luther for your help on the Joliet case. Maybe I should give becoming an investigator more thought,” said Cummings. “I’ll look into it.”

  “You do that,” Rockland replied.

  “I think we should get a move on,” interrupted Odin, “or we’ll be late for our reservation.”