“Poor Lupe,” Athena said. “She was already late to her grandson's birthday party. Those idiots have the whole street blocked off.”
“Not only that…” Fatima sounded breathless. “But I can't get one damn outside phone line, Excuse the language, Reverend, but all the lines are jammed. Even Power's private line. Forget calling Washington. We can't even call Beverly Hills.”
“What about the doctor?” said the nurse. “I'm supposed to make my report…”
A terrible roar, growing steadily louder, drowned out her words.
“Run!” the nurse screamed. “Run for cover!”
The roar grew louder, until the whole house vibrated with it.
“Jesus!” Fatima said. “A helicopter! Outside the window—they're going to shoot! Oh, my God!”
Cady's breath escaped in an involuntary cry as Fatima's body fell heavily onto hers.
Chapter 32—Cady: Under Siege
“Calm down, everybody.” Athena spoke in a steady, authoritative voice.
Cady fought to breathe as the weight of Fatima's inert body pressed down on hers.
“Fatima? Child, are you wounded? Did they shoot you?” Cady freed an arm to encircle the girl's shoulders. The poor child. Had she sacrificed her young life for Cady's sake?
“Wounded?” Athena let out an explosive laugh. “I don't think so. It's a news helicopter, Reverend. They're shooting video, not guns. I'm going to pull the blinds. LadyFat, you can get off her now. They can't get a picture through the Levelours.”
“Who are those fools?” Fatima sprang to her feet. “What channel? If a video of my backside shows up on the evening news, I am going to sue somebody's ass, I promise you.”
“Get away from that window, girl,” Athena said. “At least until I fix your hair.”
Cady felt her bed jostle again. Someone seemed to be under it.
“Nurse,” Athena said. “Nurse. What are you doing under there?”
Cady heard a whimper from under the bed as the roar subsided a bit. Athena seemed to be pulling the nurse out. “They only shoot with cameras. Reporters can be such morons. It's amazing how one stupid misunderstanding can be blown so out of proportion.”
“Not just one.” Fatima's voice came from another part of the room. “Have you been hearing this, on the TV?”
“All this going on and you're watching the goddam TV?” Athena said.
“Somebody's gotta find out what's going on.”
“I'll tell you what's going on,” Athena said. “What's going on is you got a lot of reporters assigned to cover a boring story about a funeral. They get snowed into an airport with nothing happening but everybody getting cranky. So somebody makes up a story for fun, and folks pass it around, and start asking each other, what if? And the next thing you know, you got Geraldo in a helicopter trying to interview you through your own personal bedroom window. That is what's going on. I know enough about reporters from being in the Gulf to last a lifetime.”
“Yeah, you know everything except how to shut up and listen, Miss Soldier-Girl. What I'm trying to tell you is when I was downstairs, I saw on CNN that they've checked out the princess's body. The body in the casket at the funeral.”
Fatima made a dramatic pause.
“But girlfriends, it's not her. It's not Regina in the goddam coffin. The jewelry is hers—all the rings and stuff, but they were put on the burned body afterward. The police don't know who it was in the casket at that funeral, but it wasn't Princess Regina. She might even still be alive.”
Cady felt her breath leave her body.
“Before you get too happy Reverend,” Fatima said. “I gotta tell you, those Bozo foreign police have decided your friend Florence Adams knows where Regina is. So they decided Congresswoman Cady Stanton knows where she is, too. In fact, they decided we all know where she is and that's why we've got Geraldo in a helicopter trying to interview us through the damn bedroom window.”
“Geraldo?” The nurse's voice was still shaky. “This is truly Geraldo Rivera outside the window?”
“LadyFat is just being dramatic, hon,” Athena said. “I didn't see a logo on the helicopter. Probably local TV pulled somebody off traffic patrol.”
“Yeah.” Fatima spoke from the vicinity of the window. “It's Channel Twelve. Where's the damned remote? Let's see if they're showing anything—oh, my God, it's our roof!”
The TV blared and everyone seemed suddenly convulsed with what sounded like laughter.
“It's Jamal, Reverend.” Fatima giggled. “He's on the garage roof waving a sign that says 'Go Lakers!'“
“Hey, maybe you should get your butt up there and promote your new CD,” Athena said.
The room seethed with noise: Athena and Fatima's raucous laughter, the nurse's high-pitched giggle, the helicopter's all-pervasive roar, the TV's drone—now rising to higher decibels with an irritating singing commercial. Underlying it all was the menacing rumble of what must be a growing crowd of reporters and their vehicles outside.
To Cady, the noise felt like hammers inside her head. Athena's theories about the media were probably right, but whether Regina was alive or not, crazed rumors and conspiracy theories should not be allowed to dominate the airwaves.
She ought to have given Sybil D-D a statement after all. Now she would have to find some other way to inject the voice of reason into all this mob-mentality craziness.
“Quiet!” Cady said. “Quiet, all of you. This is serious. My nurse wasn't crazy to feel like she was in a war zone. Unless I'm mistaken, we are under siege here.”
Fatima let out a laugh that turned into a gasp.
Cady turned toward her.
“Fatima, go talk to this young man on the roof, if you can get to him, and find out what he knows. If he has a phone, tell him to keep trying to get us an outside line. Tell him to get me somebody at the State Department in Washington—or at least the local police. And talk to the guards at the gate. See what they need, and have them contact us when there's anybody in authority out there. Unfortunately, the media can show up in a matter of minutes if they smell a story, but it could take days to get any official dialogue going with foreign law enforcement. I think we may all be in for a long night. When is Power due home?”
Tyrone. She had to admit she needed him. Now.
“He's supposed to be back late Monday—tomorrow,” Fatima said.
“He must be aware of all this—or he will be soon.” Cady tried to form the chaos in her brain into rational thoughts. “We've got to keep trying to contact him.”
The TV drone was so grating, Cady wanted to scream.
“Could you turn the sound off on the TV, but keep an eye on it for actual news? That thing is making my head pound.”
“Can the nurse do that?” Athena said. “Fatima needs to pretty herself up if she's going over to the garage. When she walks across that lawn, she'll be the perfect target for all the telephoto lenses out there, and whatever picture they take is going to be on every single TV in America by six o'clock tonight.”
Unbelievable. In the middle of all this, Fatima was thinking about publicity.
She felt a pull on her scalp.
“Reverend, you gotta sit up and hold still,” Athena said. “If you gave an interview to anybody right now, the world would really believe you were a terrorist crazy-woman, with this hair.”
“You must take your medication,” said the nurse, placing capsules in Cady's hand. “Are you having a headache? We must all be more quiet.”
Cady swallowed the pills and tried to will the pounding in her head to stop.
Here she was—a blind, bedridden, middle-aged political has-been with half a head of hair extensions, with no way of contacting the outside world—what could she do?
Then the thought came to her—the diaries. Now the “ransacking” of Flo's Boston house looked less like a random burglary.
Maybe the diaries contained a secret in Regina's past that could explain why someone might want to hurt her, or where she migh
t go if she were alive. Maybe some former lover was stalking her.
Wasn't there some mysterious foreign soldier Regina had talked about years ago?
She didn't realize the pain medication was carrying her out of consciousness until Fatima's voice startled her back to reality.
“Jamal's talked to Power,” Fatima said. “Finally. Power's trying to get a flight to San Montinaro. He says we should all sit tight and not talk to anybody until he's figured out what's going down over there. Not anybody. For any reason. That's what we got lawyers for, he says. Anything we say could get twisted up and used against Florence Adams. I guess somebody from the lawyer's office will be by to talk to us as soon as they can get through. If the cops do show up, Jamal's going to stonewall them until the lawyers come.”
She bounced onto the bed.
“Jamal says Power wanted specially for me to keep the Reverend calm. That's my number one job till he gets home, he said. So are you calm, Reverend Cady?”
Cady smiled at the thought that this wild teenager had become her protector.
“Calmer than I was a little while ago. I think my nurse is, too.” The nurse still seemed to be monitoring the news with the sound down low. “Are you feeling better, nurse?”
“Helen,” the nurse said. “Please call me Helen. Yes, I am fine now that the helicopter is gone. Who knows, maybe it has flown up to Santa Barbara to see these space ships. Have you been listening to the TV? They say someone saw a UFO land at Michael Jackson's ranch.”
Fatima laughed.
“You think we got trouble? Think what that man goes through every day of his life.”
“Hey, he's rich enough to afford his own army to keep these people away,” Athena said, her fingers still at work on Cady's hair. “I heard he's even brought in some ex-KGB agents from the former Soviet Union. Besides, I hear people say that man is an alien. His skin is kind of gray-colored, you know?”
“You are being so unfair,” Fatima said. “Nobody deserves this stuff. Look at Princess Regina: she had to put up with this every day of her life. And she seems like regular folks, from what I'm reading in those diaries”
Athena snorted. “So why don't you read us some more, little Miss Life's-Gotta-Be-Fair? Reverend Cady thinks there might be a clue to help Florence Adams somewhere in those diaries.”
“Sure” Fatima said. “Reading will keep you calm, right? This next one says 1966 on the outside, but the first entry is dated 1968. You want to hear about 1968?”
“Calm was in short supply in 1968, as I recall.” Cady smiled in spite of the painful memories of that fatal year. “But sure, yes, read it.”
Chapter 33—Cady: Arthuritis
Cady tried to tune out the sounds of the growing crowd outside and listened as Fatima began to read:
“March 30, 1968
“Thanks, Mom! I come home and surprise you, and not only do you have no place for me to stay, but all you say is, 'Why is your hair that color? It looks purple.' Guess what, Mom? It IS purple! I'm famous for having purple hair. Welcome to planet Earth, Mom. Your daughter is famous! Arthur's pictures of me are in galleries all over New York. I've been in a Warhol movie, for God's sake. Andy called me a Superstar. I did a shoot for Harper's Bazaar, and all you can say is 'your hair looks purple.'
“And I have to sleep in the attic.
“Kay and May have my old room, and there's some Vietnamese piano genius in the music room. Mother gives all her lessons at the college now that she's an instructor there, so of course she had to fill up the space with another substitute daughter. The real one is such a disappointment. Hide her away in the attic.
“That's where I found this old journal, stored in a wooden box, all neat and tidy—my remains—at least what was left of me after I dutifully vacated the premises and went to school. For some reason I never wrote in this one. I must have got two that year. And she packed it away; so neatly, like she's packed me away; the daughter who doesn't play music, the useless one, the one who can't even get through art school.
“I try to make nice, try to pretend the story about my hair color hasn't been told in at least a dozen magazines, which any normal mother with a vague curiosity about her offspring would look at.
“Artie painted me purple, I remind her. He painted me purple all over for a photography class project a year ago, and the paint washed off the rest of me, but the color stayed in my hair and when we were at a gallery opening a couple of days later, Andy Warhol made an appearance, and he walked right up to me and said, 'Crowned with Royal Purple. You will be the Queen of the Queens.' And he cast me in his next movie right then and there.
“'So we don't mess with my purple hair,' I said. 'It's what makes me famous.'
“Then she said, 'Why don't you eat? You are too thin.'
“Too thin. From the woman who put me on a diet from the day I hit puberty.
“I eat, Mother. Are you blind? I ate a whole salad for lunch and for dinner I ate at least half that slab of ham you put on my plate, and all the vegetables, even though you drenched them in butter. I even ate a bite of the mashed potatoes, to make you happy, and then I had to go stick my finger down my throat. I eat. I eat like a fat pig. Do you think I like having to throw up? Do you think I like chain-smoking these disgusting cigarettes?
“But if I don't, everybody makes fun of me and Arthur takes me to Dr. Roberts for those vitamin shots that keep me awake for days.
“But I'm getting to like them. The shots. I guess they're really not only vitamins. There's drugs in there, too. That's where the buzz comes from. Ziggy says everybody goes to him, even the Beatles when they're in New York. I could use a shot now.
“But I'll have to make do with gin. Professor Peabody's gin: the only alcohol Mother has. It's so sad. Mr. Peabody has been married to someone else for two years, but my pathetic mother still keeps gin and vermouth on hand for his martinis.
“Sad sad sad.
“And empty. Like my life with Artie, excuse me—Arthur. Everybody thinks I'm having all these wild orgies and crazy sex, but the truth is—oh, God, if anybody knew—I've still never had sex! Not when I was fully conscious, anyway. I don't count what those Main Line perverts did to me as sex. But the only thing sexual that Arthur does with me is when he paints my body for photographs and sometimes he goes so slowly over my nipples with that brush, that I go crazy wanting something—anything—more, but it never happens.
“That's why I had to leave. I had to come home to get away from Arthur and Jay Zigfeld and all their druggy weirdness. I hate it that they're always stoned and they have sex right there in the loft and I'm supposed to think it's cool and want to watch or something. I think it's gross. I don't care if he's gay, but why does he have to pretend to have a girlfriend? Nobody believes we're doing it but his stupid parents. They keep asking us when we're getting married. Yeah, sure: married. Arthur hardly even talks to me. I'm just canvas to him. Something to paint on.
“So I had to come home.
“Except there is no home. Not here. Not for me. Maybe for Kay and May and Nguyen—girls who are polite and neat and sanitary and make polite, neat, sanitary music. Cady too. Mother loves Cady, even though Cady isn't making music anymore either and changed her major to Political Science. and wants to apply to law school. She's so into protests and all that anti-war stuff these days. Cady's going to be a lawyer, and me—I'm an aspiring art school dropout.
“But Cady doesn't hate me. Maybe that's where I'll go, down to Bryn Mawr. She's the only family I've got now that my mother has turned into the Old Woman in the Shoe. Cady's Black Power friends are weird and boring, and Darius is a pompous idiot in his Dashikis and little pillbox hats, pretending to be named Abdullah, but the Sybils love me now that I'm famous.
“But hey, it's spring vacation, isn't it? Cady must be home in Boston. So close. I could be there in a couple of hours on the Trailways bus. I could go tomorrow. I have to go somewhere. Professor Peabody's gin is nasty.
“April 1
“Th
e April Fool is me. Why didn't I call first?
“Cady's just left on the bus for Princeton, and I'm sitting here in her Mom's bakery feeling like the great white whale after eating my third piece of pie. These people are being so nice to me, it's embarrassing. I guess I should leave, but I don't know where to go, and it's so cozy here.
“I don't know what I expected Cady's family to be like, but it wasn't this. I mean, I'd met her Mom before, but only when I came by to pick up Cady to go somewhere. Not in an apron looking like a coffee-colored Aunt Bea from Andy Griffith-land.
“Leona is so motherly. And sweet. So is Cady's stepdad, Roy. And little Sinclair is adorable, with his basketball signed by Lew Alcindor that he had to show me first thing when I walked in the door. Leroy looks at me kind of strangely, but he's seventeen and hates everything but James Brown and his mama's pies.
“All these years I've thought of Cady's family like a bunch of ragged bums drinking Ripple wine out of paper bags on the street or something. I guess that was because of what Mother told me about how Cady got put in a foster home.
“What she said is Cady's mother was an alcoholic who had to go to jail for child neglect and Welfare fraud. She told me when the social workers went to tell Cady's mom about her getting caught shoplifting at Filene's, they found Roy living there and a big party going on at the apartment, with the little kids half-drunk from stealing sips out of everybody's beers.
“Actually, that doesn't sound too different from any backyard barbecue in suburban America, but I guess if you're on Welfare, you can go to jail for almost anything. Especially getting married.
“But Leona and Roy stayed together after Leona got out of jail, and started this bakery with some kind of an Urban Renewal loan. Now they're married and make a nice living and Roy doesn't have to work at the docks any more. He does the business side and Leona bakes the bread and the pies and Sinclair and Leroy help out, and they own a great brownstone house a few blocks away.
“The pies. You would not believe the pies. Peach and blackberry and pecan and something called Chocolate Angel Pie. If there is a heaven and angels live there, I'll swear this pie is what they eat.”
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 93