We moved on, stomachs growling in the lettuce-colored dining room where the bread sticks and salads the caterer had put out looked as good as the baronial decor. We toured Mitchell’s paneled lair, admiring its “manly” color scheme and aroma, both dark, both tobacco, and the ornately carved racks—one for pipes, the other displaying antique, expensive pistols. We moved to the media center, electronics swaddled in fine cabinetry that silently opened at the push of a hidden control panel. We murmured through Ivy Jean’s Art Deco home office, and in the mirrored state-of-the-art gymnasium we stared at our non-state-of-the-art reflections.
And then we reached the master bedroom. Nikki had been right. Ivy Jean was in bed. But she’d been wrong about the rest. Ivy was alone and she wasn’t doing aerobics because she wasn’t doing breathing. There was a large and ugly hole in the center of her chest and an ivory-handled gun in her hand on the bloodstained spread.
I don’t know who screamed first, but the whole group backed up. Some, gagging, rushed off to bathrooms. Barby, skin now parchment hue, shook her head, over and over, and Nikki exhaled loudly, the way you do when a hard job is finished.
I stared, horrified and immeasurably sad for Ivy and the dead body she’d never enjoyed. I looked at the wisp on the bed, all bones and no conviction, a heartbreaking waste, and wished for another chance at lunch with her, another chance to convince her that she did, indeed, exist.
“Don’t touch anything,” I whispered to whichever committee members were still in the room. It was a foolish thing to utter, even in a whisper, because we’d already fondled and stroked most of the apartment. “I’ll call the police,” I added. At least that made sense.
*
A gaggle of specialists appeared. Some headed for the bedroom to inspect, identify, and label, and others questioned the reunion committee.
“Why on earth are you keeping us?” I asked Mackenzie. I was being interrogated in a flowery, wickery guest bedroom. “I have to leave or my tenth graders will never know ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’”
“Movin’ fast as we can,” he said. Whatever our relationship, when push comes to shove, what matters is that he’s a cop. Especially at a crime scene. I was given permission to use the guest room telephone to call my school. The brief and painful conversation that ensued gave me a brain ache. My principal has remarkably low tolerance for staff involvements in unnatural deaths.
“An entire classroom of kids who’ll never thrill to ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.’ And now I’m in big trouble, too.”
“I’ll write you an excuse,” Mackenzie said. “Now, tell me everythin’ about Ivy Jean Hoffman.”
I did just that, back to communal Nutcracker outings and forward through today’s gossip. “And that’s it. And none of it explains why she’d kill herself,” I concluded.
“She didn’t.”
“But—the gun, I saw, we all saw—”
“Somebody wanted you to think she did. For starters, she shouldn’t have been holdin’ it. Gun shoots out of the hand of a real suicide. And if she’d fired it, powder burns would be on the front and back of her hand, not just the palm, like they are. There’s even somethin’ peculiar, somethin’ wrong about the bullet hole itself…”
“Murdered,” I said. “Murdered. But by whom?”
“From what you said, there was enough money and sex and cheatin’ and anger right in the committee for a whole passel of murders.”
“That was only talk. Besides, none of us was in here until after she was dead.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “How ’bout somebody comin’ up earlier? Ivy’s let any one of you in and then, bang, she’d be dead and you could leave. Later, you come back and look innocent. That’s why we’re checkin’ y’all for powder burns.”
“That’s ridiculous. How do you think we arranged for her to undress, lie down, and be shot?”
Mackenzie paced the small room. “I need to work on that part.”
“Furthermore, the front door was locked.”
“Door locks automatically when you close it.”
“The guard,” I said. “He knows who came up here.”
“This one’s shift started at noon and he says the mornin’ guy’s the building owner’s nephew. He flunked out of drub rehab and tends to sleep on the job when he isn’t drinkin’. Didn’t log a single visitor to the building all mornin’, let alone the last hour. Frankly, I think the tenants could save a lot of money by replacin’ him with a photo of a guard. Be just as effective.”
“Why’d you single out the last hour as important for visitors?” I asked.
“That’s when she was killed. Her temperature’s still normal. A body drops a degree and a half an hour, more or less. And a skinny thing like her with no body fat would cool down fast. No insulation.”
“She thought she was fat,” I murmured.
“Rigor’s movin’ fast, but she’s pretty muscular,” he said. “A weird thing—the body’s salty. Must’ve worked out and not showered. Lay down for a nap, maybe?”
“Sweaty? On her brand-new spread?” But before I could further explain domestic niceties, there was an explosion of male sounds outside. Mitchell Hoffman was back in his castle. We went out to watch.
“Why would Ivy do such a terrible thing?” he wailed. “Why?” He put his hand to his face as if hoping there were tears there. There were not. He dropped his hand. He was a rotten actor and obviously had no idea of how grief felt.
After he’d been taken aside and informed that it was murder, he erupted. “Where’s goddamned security? What are we paying for? I’ll have their heads, by God, I’ll—”
No horror, no sorrow, no tears, no surprise, no questions, especially the ones about who would do such a terrible thing or why anyone would consider it. My money was on Mitchell, and after Mackenzie had finished questioning him, I said so.
The detective sighed. “He has motive, sure. In over his head and couldn’t afford a divorce. It’s his gun, too. But he also has an alibi. He’s been, since nine a.m., in a corporate strategy meeting—don’t ask what that means—and he has one dozen witnesses for every minute of it. Includin’ trips to the men’s room, he says. So. Cherchez la femme. Or les femmes, perhaps?”
Aiding and abetting Mackenzie’s suspicions, neither Nikki nor Barby had decent alibis. Nikki claimed to have worked alone at home all morning and Barby had been in and out of stores, killing time, not Ivy. Unfortunately, she’d bought nothing and no salesperson was likely to remember her.
They found no powder burns on any of us, but we’d had lots of time to wash or chemically treat our hands or do whatever killers did to hide evidence.
“Why aren’t you thinking about a lover?” I demanded. Mackenzie and I had relocated to a corner of the living room, where we were eyed suspiciously by my former high-school classmates, as if we were forming a clique and snobbishly excluding them. “Somebody with a key who didn’t even talk to the guard,” I said. “Because if it wasn’t a lover, why was she lying naked on top of the bedspread?”
“No signs of sex so far. Could she have sweat enough in anticipation to make herself salty? Or maybe the caterer…” Mackenzie mused. “Maybe she was already up here first and—”
“If you’d seen the woman, heard her, you’d know how far-fetched that is. She called Ivy ‘Mrs. Hoffman’ and she was scared to death of losing her as a customer.” Mention of the caterer triggered thoughts of all her work, of the wilting salads. “That food’s going to spoil.” I couldn’t even repackage it, since I’d crushed all the containers in that gizmo. “Should I wrap and refrigerate it?” I asked, hoping to snag a lettuce leaf. I was exceedingly hungry, even though it was probably inappropriate to feel such mundane urges at this time. “You don’t need it as evidence. She wasn’t poisoned, after all.”
“Don’t touch anything, okay?” Mackenzie said.
Something nagged at me besides hunger. Something I’d already said echoed, but too distantly to catch.
&n
bsp; “She really thought she was fat?” Mackenzie asked.
I nodded. “Obsessed. You’ve seen her at her worst, though. With clothes on, she didn’t look that scrawny.” It was a shame she’d died naked. As soon as they allowed, I’d dress her as a last act of decency.
More mental nagging. Bits and pieces of the day bumped and clumped in my mind, like magnetic shavings. I sifted through them. Ivy. Ivy, of course. The Ancient Mariner. Water, water. Obsession. Sex. Salt. The incompetent guard. Salty bedspread. Mitchell and money. Perfection. Mitchell and other women. Ivy and other men. Quick rigor mortis. Water, water. Now I was not only hungry, but thirsty. I wondered if I could disturb the scene of the crime, or at least the water faucet. I’d wear gloves and leave no fingerprints. But even so, a human touching anything in that pristine house was an intrusion. Ivy appeared to have been as fanatical about her house as she’d been about her body.
Pathetic Ivy. So driven and frightened and needy. So hungry.
Anorexic Ivy complaining last Friday that she was too fat, that a TV commercial for TYW would be ruined.
Ivy shopping for nonfood. Five boxes of plastic wrap and not a leftover to cling to.
The compactor. Styrofoam floating on a sea of—
“Mackenzie,” I said. “I have it.”
“I’ve known that for a while now.”
“I’m talking about Ivy’s murder.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Could body temperature be a wrong estimate of time of death?”
He shrugged. “Sure, if, say, the victim had a fever when she died and the coroner didn’t know it, or if the temperature of the room was real high or low. Things like that.”
“Or a thing like the corpse had been done up like a mummy in plastic wrap?”
“What’s that? A kinky sex trick?”
“A kinky diet trick. To sweat off pounds. Instant sauna.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Dangerous. It can raise your core temperature.” I’d read that warning in a fitness magazine. I read about diet and exercise a lot, trusting my muscles to acknowledge my good intentions and firm and tone themselves.
“Well, well, well,” he drawled. “Her core temperature was up and she was sweating. The Case of the Salty Corpse. Amanda Pepper does it again.”
“Yards of plastic wrap in the compactor,” I said. “I assumed the caterer put it there, but she used Styrofoam containers. Ivy put it there.”
“Correction: Amanda Pepper almost does it again. Ivy’s murderer put the plastic wrap in there. She was shot while she was wrapped. Pretty much point-blank, but it wouldn’t seem logical to imply that a woman had wrapped herself in plastic before shooting herself, would it? That’s why the wound looked odd. I’ll bet the lab finds melted or fused plastic wrap in it, but even so, they’d never have guessed why.”
“So you think the killer saw that she was wrapped up and fairly immobile—certainly couldn’t jump up and trot away easily—shot her and unwrapped her—”
“And put the gun in her hand,” Mackenzie added, “and—”
“—left for a corporate strategy session.” We smiled at each other. For once, the most logical suspect was the most logical suspect. “And sober, stoned or not, the guard didn’t log anybody coming up here because nobody did. The mister left for work, that’s all.”
“So maybe,” Mackenzie said slowly, “instead of givin’ you a note for your principal, we should give you a police citation.”
“I’d settle for a late lunch.”
“How do cheeseburgers with fries sound?”
“Here? In this house? Pornographic. Sacrilegious. Depraved. But I want onion rings, too. And Rocky Road and Oreos afterward.” I would exorcize the diet devil who had possessed Ivy Jean until only bones, obsession, and plastic wrap were left.
Poor lost Ivy. Rest in peace.
I hoped she could, but I doubted it. What, after all, would she do for all eternity with no body of her own or others to criticize and desperately try to improve?
In order to tackle such a metaphysical puzzler, my brain required feeding. And so began my first annual Ivy Jean Hoffman Memorial Lunch.
In the end, out of respect, I told them to hold the onion rings.
Where’s the Harm in That?
My mother always said, “Girls who are too picky about who they marry eventually find the pickings gone.” Luckily for me, I never had time to be picky, or anything to pick over. My prince showed up right away, in high school. Prince Hal, I called him, and I wrote “The End,” and a happy ending it was to my personal fairy tale.
But I remembered my mother’s warnings when I met Amber for dinner. Amber and I went way back, but since I married nineteen years ago, we’d gone our separate ways. She was a big success—her own company. Image consultants, whatever that meant. She was the city mouse. I was the country mouse with kids and a part-time job selling glue sticks and appliqués at Krafty Korners.
Every so often, we tried to find common ground, but it was always on “her” side of the city boundaries. Amber wouldn’t dream of venturing out to the boonies if she could help it. That was as close as we were able to get to compromise. I was always the one who had to travel the furthest, literally and figuratively.
But it was worth the trip, as a reminder to me, because for all her sophisticated and glamorous life, her elegance and accomplishments, her travel and adventures, Amber was unhappy. You can bet that her mother hadn’t warned her about being too picky, the way mine had. So now, as we stood on the far edge of our thirties, the great forever after on the horizon, Amber was in a state of wide-eyed panic.
“Don’t you know anybody?” she asked. Amber wasn’t the sort to whine, but there was an edge of desperation to her voice I’d never heard before.
But I had heard the question before. From Amber. And I had searched my soul and Rolodex and hadn’t come up with a solitary male who was single, straight, available and functioning. Plus, Amber wanted him tall. And solvent.
On her behalf, I had monitored my friends’ marriages, searching for signs of rot, ready to pounce if they fell apart. But their marriages, like mine, seemed to have reached equilibrium, or simply a state of resignation, and not a one collapsed. Well, two did: George and Harriet’s, and Merle and Paul’s. I don’t count them, because George left Harriet for Paul, which rendered both former husbands ineligible for the Amber sweeps.
“Anybody?” she repeated. “Where are all the good men?”
I knew the answer to that, not that she was really asking. She never wanted to hear about my life. Acted like it was boring. Like nothing happened. But out there in the boonies, that’s where the good ones were, the ones with staying power. With me. And what was left for Amber were the boys you never had wanted to date, only they were old now.
Amber had tried them all. Scheherazade’s Thousand and One Nights were no more than a long weekend compared to Amber’s accumulated nights and nightmares.
“I don’t want to go to bars, I can’t afford a marriage broker, I won’t attend one more of those dreadful singles’ outings. They’re all women, anyway. I can’t bear to sign up for another of those dating services. They are absolutely the worst. I could tell you stories…”
She had. Hal said I had no imagination, so maybe that’s why I loved being told stories, particularly Amber’s grown-up versions of fairytales about ogres and monsters and horrid things that lived under bridges. They were fun because unlike Amber, I didn’t have to date the trolls.
Amber poked at her seared tuna. She constantly sliced, rearranged and mashed food, which, as far as I could tell, never went into her. That’s another bad thing about staying single. Makes you think you also have to stay adolescent with wee budding breasts, flat stomach, pipestem appendages.
“You have no idea what it’s like out there,” she said. “You and your perfect marriage. You’re so sheltered, so innocent!”
“Just because I’m married doesn’t mean I’ve been living in a cave the
last two decades,” I snapped.
“Might as well, as far as men are concerned. Have you even ever known a man besides Hal?”
“What do you mean, ‘known’?”
“Hah!” She plunged her fork into the tuna and mashed half of it down. “I thought so. Your high school love, your one and only! I can’t believe it. Little Mrs. Faithful!”
“Is that suddenly a crime? Am I on trial?”
“Sorry.” Her shoulders slumped inside her perfectly cut suit jacket. “I’m jealous.”
As well she might be. But even so, she had no business deriding my happiness just because she was miserable. She’d been too good for everybody who wanted her, until just as my mother said, the pickings—and my patience—were both gone. “How about ads,” I asked, deciding that this was my last suggestion and the last time I wanted to talk about Amber’s social life, unless it changed a whole lot. “You know, where you specify what vintage, style and special accessories you want.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s…demeaning. Tacky. Needy. Desperate. And dangerous. What if they turn out to be serial killers seeking victims?”
“Why should an ad placer be more dangerous than guys you get fixed up with or meet at work? They’re in some pretty upscale magazines and papers. Take a chance now and then!”
“That’s great advice, coming from you,” she snapped. “Mrs. Play-it-safe. When have you ever taken a chance on anything more serious than a raffle ticket?”
I spluttered and protested, but the truth was, I couldn’t think of a single time.
All of a sudden, I wasn’t hungry anymore.
“Besides,” Amber said, “the people who write those ads must be weird, or why’d they need to place one?”
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