by Denise Dietz
I reached to squeeze him back, but sneezed instead.
Lifting my sweatshirt, his warm lips nuzzled my breasts.
I sneezed again. And again. And again.
Vaguely, I wondered if perfect Patty had ever sneezed during a climax.
* * *
By midnight, my stuffy nose dripped, my throat was raw, and my face burned like a Girl Scout’s marshmallow. I didn’t feel mawkish anymore, but I did feel sorry for myself. It wasn’t fair. I had survived poison, Texas, and Charlie Bronson’s booby-trapped pantyhose. Could I possibly allow myself to be felled by the twenty-four-hour flu?
No way! Twelve hours at the max. Because I planned to visit Alice, with or without Ben, come hell or high water.
High water didn’t come, but hell did. With a vengeance. My body blazed and my brain sizzled like bacon. I could hear the devil laughing up a storm outside my window. How I wished it would rain inside my bedroom. A soothing shower.
Ben seemingly had the same thought. Maybe not. Forget soothing showers. He filled my tub with cold tap water, ice cubes and me.
“Poke this thermometer under your tongue,” he said. “Open your mouth, honey.”
I couldn’t open my mouth. Unless I gritted my teeth, they chattered like those wind-up dentures they sell in novelty shops.
I preferred hell to my bathtub, I really did.
It wasn’t fair.
* * *
When I awoke the next morning, the sun was shining. My nose was still stuffy and my throat felt like I had swallowed rusty razor blades, but my fever had gone down the drain, along with several melting ice cubes.
Ben clutched his pillow. I guess at one point he had clutched me, and I guess it felt good to be cradled by strong arms, yet I deplored my weakness. The weak don’t inherit anything except debts, and they don’t solve murders.
I walked downstairs, called Joe, and postponed the lock-changing appointment. Hitchcock would have roused Ben, and Ben needed sleep. Reentering the bedroom, I noticed how exhausted he looked. His dark lashes didn’t quite hide the smudges under his eyes, and he breathed deeply, like a little boy after a rough and tumble day at the amusement park.
Speaking of which, my slasher movie soundtrack was due. If I didn’t finish it soon, I would miss my deadline. Most of the background stuff had already been completed, but the producer wanted a scary theme for his killer, an amusement park fun house proprietor who was badly scarred. Therein lay my problem. Everything I composed sounded like Andrew Lloyd Webber. I mean, it didn’t just sound like Andrew Lloyd, it was Andrew Lloyd. Maybe after Texas and the library, I could conjure up some original notes. All I had to do was remember how I felt when I saw Charlie’s purple lipstick, and how I felt when I saw the lipstick-printed words on the mirror.
Avoiding my mirror, positive my eye-smudges looked like Ben’s, I donned clean jeans and my freshly laundered, lucky orange sweatshirt. Was it still lucky? After all, I had been poisoned while wearing it. But I had worn it inside out and backwards, so the luck might have been hidden.
Justification achieved, I tugged on my comfy cowboy boots and tiptoed downstairs again.
Hitchcock looked mournful.
“Did I forget to feed you last night? Bad Ingrid!”
I filled his dish with kibble, added several large biscuits, and remembered how Wylie loved to chomp dog biscuits. “After all, I was born in the year of the Dog,” he had teased.
Bingo had been addicted to Kentucky Fried Chicken. He was a Cock and roosters peck other birds, or so I’ve heard.
Why was I playing this ridiculous Chinese zodiac game? Why was I obsessing over food? Because I was hungry, that’s why. I couldn’t cook worth beans, but I could boil water. Hot tea would soothe my sore throat. Ramen Noodle Soup would give me strength.
Toting a mug of tea in one hand, a spoon-masted Styrofoam cup of soup in the other, I finally sat down at my piano.
But I couldn’t concentrate. My first finger kept plunking “my dog has fleas” while the words “cut away an el’fant” pushed everything else from my brain. Dum, dum, dum, dum. Cut away an el’fant.
Wait a sec! The answer to Wylie’s riddle wasn’t cut away an elephant. It was cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
Okay. Think loud. Think strong. What does an elephant look like? An elephant has big ears. Did any of my suspects have big ears? Nope. Patty didn’t even wear big earrings.
Elephants are thickset, nearly hairless. Junior was nearly hairless, but he couldn’t be called thickset, not by any stretch of the imagination. Unless you counted his butt. Maybe Wylie had counted Junior’s butt. Tad was thickset, if you counted her breasts. And Tad had tusks, or at least incisors. But would an aging cheerleader shout eat shit and die, then bop her provoker over the head the very next day? It would be a tad obvious.
Anyway, everybody yelled stuff they didn’t mean. If Wylie’s balls had been severed by a hatchet, Ben would be on death row.
Patty and Alice weren’t thickset, au contraire.
Elephants have muscular trunks.
Abandoning my piano bench, I raced toward the family room, retrieved my dictionary, and took a few moments to study Doris Day. I’d have to frame and hang her soon, even though she didn’t seem to mind the floor. Well, hell, she reclined against comfy pillows, didn’t she?
“What’s the deal, Doris? You witnessed Wylie’s murder. Was it Junior? Alice? Tad? Dwight? Patty?”
Did Lady Day’s smile expand when I mentioned Patty?
Perched atop my piano bench again, I thumbed through the dictionary. Truncheon. Trundle. Trunk: the main stem of a tree; a large rigid piece of luggage; the proboscis of an elephant; men’s shorts worn chiefly for sports.
Aha! Sports! Junior? Dwight? Farfetched!
Looking down at the dictionary, I muttered the last definition out loud. “The body apart from the head and appendages: the torso.”
Who possessed a muscular torso? Stewie and Dwight and Ben. But I had to believe that Ben was innocent. Why? Because he said so. And because I loved him.
I couldn’t really believe that Stewie had returned from the dead—talk about farfetched. Unless, of course, Wylie’s comment about resurrecting as a Stephen King corpse had some deeper meaning.
If I honestly believed that theory, I’d be sitting inside the local loony bin, clunking my Chicago-scarred forehead against a padded wall.
That left Dwight Eisenhower Cooper. Assuming Dwight had caught Wylie unaware, reclining like Doris Day, what would be his motive? The jock thing? The drinking contest? The car crash? Jealousy?
Could Dwight truly be jealous? When I visited Alice, I’d have to view her through objective eyes. Rich Alice. Thin, bony Alice. Neat-as-a-pin Alice. And, until recent revelations, virginal Alice.
I was ignoring my soundtrack. Perhaps a logical interpretation for Wylie’s riddle would occur, unbidden, while I composed the bad guy music for Phantom of the Amusement Park.
After approximately forty-five minutes and three cups of tea, I realized that my bad guy’s theme still sounded like Andrew Lloyd Webber, diluted by instant soup.
Since my creative caretaker played hide and seek, I really had no good reason to stay home.
Should I wake Ben?
I didn’t want to wake Ben. He was on vacation. He needed sleep. Also, I had the gut feeling he wasn’t a team player.
In other words, he wouldn’t let me carry the ball. And he’d probably punt on third down. Would that be so bad? Yes. I wasn’t a mystery solver, but I had to solve this particular mystery. My pride was at stake, not to mention my life.
Maybe I should lasso Hitchcock, toss him inside Jeep, take him along as my watchdog-bodyguard. That way, Ben wouldn’t worry.
He might not worry but he’d definitely feel the urge to rattle my bones.
Unless Wylie’s killer rattled my bones first.
I stood, nudged my piano bench backwards with my butt, hit one last discordant chord, and looked for Hitchcock’s ch
oke collar. And finally found it, outside the doggie door, along with my TV remote.
“Great balls of fire, Hitchcock!”
My ganglionic mutt looked both guilty and smug.
So did I.
Chapter Twenty
Hitchcock and Jeep have a love-hate relationship. Jeep stalls with less frequency when Hitchcock balances himself on her front seat, and yet her transmission seems to shudder when Hitchcock lifts his leg and pees across her tires. Hitchcock hates the smell of exhaust fumes, and yet he loves to poke his head outside Jeep’s window and capture air between his teeth.
Sometimes Hitchcock barks at shadows while Jeep revs loudly. On those occasions, my imagination kicks in. I can almost hear Jeep shout, “Look, Hitchcock, there’s a cat! Chase the cat!” And I can almost hear Hitchcock growl, “Jeeze, Jeep, why don’t you honk your horn? Maybe Cat’ll run under your tires, the ones I peed on.”
Usually I was amused by the antics of my mutt and car. But today I anxiously anticipated a conversation with Alice Shaw Cooper, a woman I had known since childhood, a woman I wanted to meet again for the first time.
Soon we all arrived at Alice’s house, which looked as if it had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright on steroids. The structure possessed the broad low roofs and horizontal lines that were the hallmark of Wright’s prairie houses, yet it bulged every now and then with diminutive Gothicism.
Alice’s new-old 1991 granite silver BMW 5251 blocked the driveway. Her manicured lawn was bordered by tree stems. I hitched Hitchcock to a stem.
“Stay, Hitchcock! Good dog.”
The sun had disappeared and I felt winter color my cheeks crimson. How cold was it? It was so cold, the snowman made a down payment on a house.
“Damn it, Wylie,” I said between clenched teeth. “Once I solve your murder, will you stop haunting me? No more dumb jokes. No more riddles.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Hitchcock wouldn’t be much protection, tied to a tree trunk. I knew, however, that Alice would never let me enter her immaculate domain with a shaggy-haired mutt by my side. Except for her marbled vestibule and fired-clay-tile kitchen, Alice’s rooms were carpeted. White carpeting. Correction. The formal dining room had off-white carpeting, but it was plush.
I tapped my fingernail against her ornamental doorbell.
She answered on the first ring, as if she had been peering through her stained glass window, the one with all those goofy, frolicking unicorns.
“Well,” she said, “it’s about time. I was wondering when you’d finally show up.”
“Why on earth would I show up?”
“Ingrid, it’s proper to make a condolence call.”
“I did make a condolence call. I condoled Patty. Why would I condole you?”
“Wylie was my fiancé.”
“That was thirty years ago.”
“Better late than never.”
“What?”
“Better late than—”
“Never mind. Look, Alice, I’m sorry Wylie was struck down in his prime. He had so much to give the world. He will live in our hearts forever. On our walls, too. Everybody collected Wylie. Everybody loved him.”
Except Patty, Junior, Dwight, Tad, Woody and Ben.
As I continued mouthing my standard, albeit caustic clichés, I tried to study Alice through Wylie’s eyes, through any man’s eyes. She wasn’t tall or short. She was thin rather than slender. Her clavicle knobbed and her hipbones jutted. Her breasts were practically nonexistent. Maybe she had great nipples, but I didn’t know for sure. I had never seen her naked, not even inside the locker room or during pajama parties. She scorned tight clothes and always wore full slips.
Alice had moved to Colorado Springs in 1959. Although she couldn’t carry a tune, she knew all the words to “Purple People Eater.” She could sing “The Chipmunk Song” and sounded like Alvin. We clasped her to our budding bosoms.
The early sixties embraced us. Two of our favorite things were The Sound of Music and Billy Gray (Bud) in Father Knows Best. Even after Our Gang’s female members had switched to straight skirts with kick pleats, Alice flaunted full skirts over forty-’leven petticoats. That was Patty’s word, forty-’leven, but I used it in one of my protest songs. “Forty-’leven soldiers, marching ’cross the sea.”
The seventies arrived with a bang. Kent State. Four student demonstrators killed. My mother sent me a letter that began: “Dear Ingrid, are you happy now?” Alice’s newsletter, black-bordered, listed all of our classmates who were wounded, dead or missing in action. It was the first time her chatty gossip sheet had mentioned Vietnam.
The eighties emerged. John Lennon gave an autograph and signed his life away. Wylie’s painting of John—AS USUAL, THERE’S A GREAT WOMAN BEHIND EVERY MAN—was sold to Yoko for an undisclosed amount—some said six figures. Wylie’s painting of Ronald Reagan—IF YOU’VE SEEN ONE REDWOOD, YOU’VE SEEN THEM ALL—was purchased by Arnold Schwarzenegger—some said he destroyed it. Alice began to clothe herself in black and white. Black for John Lennon, white to celebrate Reagan’s White House victory.
The eighties segued into the non-nonconformist nineties. Kids sported perforated faces and bodies, and soon they’d all look like human cribbage boards. Alice didn’t even possess pierced ears. If God had wanted her to wear holes in her ears, Alice was fond of saying, he would have needled her lobes from the get-go.
Opening the door wide, she gestured me inside. “I hope they catch the S.O.B. who killed Wylie,” she said.
“Maybe it was a D.O.B.” I shed my camel’s hair jacket, handed it to Alice, and vaguely noted that her vestibule was decorated with a hat rack. Which included a couple of orange and blue Denver Broncos stocking caps, a black Stetson, an old-fashioned Easter bonnet, and one Beatles poor boy cap.
“What’s a D.O.B.?” she asked, hanging my jacket inside the front hall closet.
“Daughter of a bitch.”
“Ingrid, you’re such a wisecracker. Shall we go into the living room?”
I glanced down at my mud-encrusted cowboy boots. “How about the kitchen, Alice?”
“Okay,” she said somewhat reluctantly, “but you’ll have to excuse the mess. We’re redecorating, raising the cabinets.”
“Why raise them? Dwight won’t be able to reach—”
“He’s better, Ingrid. It’s a miracle. Remember when Dwight went away last summer?”
I didn’t, but I nodded.
“He heard about this Midwestern preacher who cures through touch and prayer,” Alice’s brown eyes practically glowed.
Touch and prayer? It sounded like a new long distance telephone company. Sprint, MCI, AT&T, T&P.
“Alice,” I said, “are you telling me that Dwight’s cured?”
“No. But he’s improved.”
“Define improved.”
“He can stand. I mean, he can’t walk or even move away from his wheelchair yet, but it’s a start.”
I pictured Dwight sprinting across the football field while Tad and her fellow cheerleaders hollered two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, and my heart ached.
“Maybe,” I said sarcastically, “Dwight’s preacher can cure my songwriter’s block.”
“You couldn’t afford him,” Alice shot back. “He charges a fortune. But he gives most of his money to charity.”
“What’s his name? Elmer Gantry?”
“No, Ingrid. His name is Starbuck.”
Holy crap! Starbuck! The leading character in The Rainmaker, one of Patty and my all-time favorite movies.
“Yup,” I said, “it’s a miracle. I wonder if Starbuck’s paid Colorado Springs a visit. We’ve had so much rain recently.”
“Better rain than snow.” Alice glanced toward the kitchen window, where icy blasts had begun to rattle the insulated glass. Then she nodded toward what her parents had called “The Breakfast Nook.” Alice had inherited her house from her folks. Our Gang had clustered around that antique oak table many times. Wylie always called it the breakfast nook
y.
Gingerly, I slid my butt onto the wooden seat of a ladder-back chair. “Where’s Dwight, Alice? I didn’t see his van.”
“Gosh, Ingrid, he’s selling insurance. During the reunion, Dwight had appointments day and night. Then, after Wylie’s death, everybody suddenly wanted extended coverage, new policies. Dwight takes them out to breakfast, lunch, supper. Sometimes he doesn’t get home until dawn. He looks so tired, but he’s in hog heaven. Dwight would be walking on air if he could walk, and he will walk some day, thanks to Preacher Starbuck.”
“I just got over the flu,” I said, as if Dwight’s insurance might be providential and Preacher Starbuck had missed his big chance by a somewhat narrow margin.
“Gee whiz, you poor thing. Here, sit on my cushioned chair. Are you hot? Cold? Would you like a cup of tea?”
I was already caffeinated to the max, so I said, “Do you have any vodka handy?”
“Wisecracker! Dwight and I don’t drink. Well, I’ve sipped a little sherry now and again, for very special occasions.”
“What about Wylie?”
“What do you mean what about Wylie?”
“Maybe you keep a bottle of booze handy, just in case your lover arrives unexpectedly.”
“Lover?”
“Don’t play dumb, kiddo. Tad confessed.”
“Oh, dear. Wylie thought Tad saw us, but she was sound asleep when he left.” Alice slid her rump onto my abandoned chair, arranged her black pleated skirt beneath her knees, picked imaginary lint from her white blouse, and raised her chin. “After Elvis died,” she said, “women came out of the woodwork. He loved me. No, me. No, me. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Wylie loved me.”
“Apparently he loved me, too.”
“Bullshit!”
Instinctively, I glanced around to see if anybody else had shouted that word, a ventriloquist maybe.
Alice’s smile was complacent. “Did Wylie play games with you?”
“What do you mean by games?”
“Obviously he didn’t.”
“What kind of games?”
“Do you promise to keep it a secret, Ingrid? Cross your heart and hope to die?”