I turned and reached up toward what I called my tea cupboard, but what was really my cracker, cookie, spiced almond and cashew cupboard, with packages of ancient tea shoved into crumpled heaps in the back. I propped myself up, leaning on the counter, thinking about how pathetic I had become, thanks to murder, mayhem and general confusion. I leaned over the sink, facing the window overlooking the pathway. I glanced out at the view, hoping the sight of autumn leaves would comfort me. Only there was no view. Just a face staring back at me.
I screamed. And knocked the Mogen David off the counter. Damn. Right on my foot. Then I sort of slumped down and relaxed.
• • •
I was dreaming about Godiva chocolates. I was swimming through a vat of Godiva chocolate and trying to kick aside various nuts that were in my way. I kept sinking back into the dark, black richness of the chocolate, and then I would float back to the surface.
Even though I just wanted to float with the chocolate, there was an annoying voice trying to bring me to the surface.
“Ms. Malone? Louise? Lu? Lulu?”
My parents had never called me Lu. They had insisted I stick with Louise. I had adopted Lulu when I was a silly grown-up, thinking it might help my brilliant career. My parents still thought of the comic strip when they heard the name, and worried I might have a boyfriend called Tubby. Sometimes, after a few martinis, they even asked about him.
“Ms. Malone?”
Oh, that sounded more adult. Maybe I should address this.
I came up through the dark chocolate and saw a familiar face. It looked like—oh no—Ryga.
I was lying on my sofa, and Ryga was trying to pour something down my throat. Truth serum, I bet. I spat it out, right onto his cashmere sweater. Whoops.
“Thanks,” he said, and walked into the kitchen.
I felt very glamorous, lying there on the sofa, emanating Mogen David, which I had just elegantly spat up. Luckily, Ryga was not on my list of potential boyfriends. This was because I did not have a list of potential boyfriends. Women who drink Mogen David do not date, I decided. They just doze in a netherworld of sweet wine, until one day they wake up in a dumpster. Reminder: send cheque to homeless shelter. Fast. Before I get there.
Ryga came back, brushing at his sweater with a faded tea towel. He was wearing well-worn grey cords and a light grey sweater, which, to my relief, I noted was even more worn. At least I hadn’t ruined this year’s Ralph Lauren. But, I reasoned, it would have been his fault anyway, for surprising me like that.
“You fainted. Sorry,” he said, still mopping his sweater.
“I did not,” I said. “I do not faint.”
He just looked at me, deadpan.
“I am an actor,” I said grandly. “We faint publicly, for money, frequently. But we never actually faint.”
His mouth went into a strange squiggle, which could have been anything from gas to a repressed guffaw. I immediately realized how stupid I sounded and decided to shut up before I pontificated any further. I also wondered if I had really fainted. How strange. Was that what it was like to faint? Was this a sign of a major health problem? Would I be able to afford treatment if the Bow Wow royalties never appeared? I’d have to sell my condo and I would never be able to afford a pair of Louboutins. Life would be horrible. I would lose my job as a highly paid staff member at McDonald’s. And—oh my goodness—I had totally forgotten to check in and tell them I was indisposed. Maybe I just wouldn’t call them at all. Maybe I just wanted to die right now, in front of Ryga. It would serve him right.
I hadn’t realized that I was crying. I think it was the shock of the face in the window.
Ryga turned and walked away. Totally revolted by my lack of cool. No man is comfortable with tears, especially the messy, hiccupy tears I was spewing. Tears in movies are fine, the sort that I had let dribble from my velvet eyes on camera in my younger days, when reviewers described me as “poignantly sensual.” Right now, I was revoltingly real.
Ryga returned from the kitchen with a box of tissues, and swung it under my nose. I hauled out a handful, and hiccuped.
He dropped it on the floor beside me, lowered himself into an armchair and looked at me intently.
It is always comforting to know that new humiliating moments in one’s life are just around the corner.
I decided to take an aggressive stance.
“Policemen shouldn’t lurk around people’s—hic!—homes,” I said, with great dignity. “It—hic!—frightens them.”
“I apologize for the lurk,” he said. “I saw the lights were on, rang your doorbell and, when you didn’t respond, thought I should check to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh.”
I paused for a moment. Damn. If only he had argued. I could have got—hic!—some wind up. Instead, I didn’t have anybody—hic!—to fight.
There was a long pause, while I tried not to hiccup and he watched me.
“Why are you so nervous?” he asked.
“Because a ten-foot-tall maniac tried to kill me last night?” I said. “Is that good enough?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Although, realistically, you do realize that he was not ten feet tall, only about six foot four? You need to keep these facts straight.”
I made a face, then closed my eyes and pretended to suffer. What I was really doing was trying to cement into my mind what I could and could not say right now. Anything to do with Stan was a no-no. But Mr. Size Twenty I could fall apart over. Damn, it was hard to keep the lies straight.
That is why I generally disapprove of lying, aside from the basic ethical issues. Of course, I try to avoid it for moral reasons. I don’t like people who adopt lying as a way of life, and profess astonishment when they encounter a person who chooses not to lie. Somehow, in their lives, the lights never went on in the area of honesty, trust and integrity. Total dimness there.
The exceptions in this dim area of untruthfulness are the lies in crucial situations—for example, when, the day before her wedding, your best friend shows you her balloon-shaped wedding dress, which she has just paid ten thousand dollars to have sewn by French peasants who charge five dollars a stitch, and which makes her look as if she weighs five hundred pounds. In these situations, lying is an act of kindness and is perfectly acceptable, in my moral code. But in other situations, which range from banking to yearly physicals to less crucial things like being interviewed by police officers, once you start lying, you are zigzagging down a path of anxiety. And maybe down the road to hell.
“You’re very quiet,” said Ryga.
“I was thinking about wedding dresses.”
I mentally smacked myself on my already tender forehead for the banality of the text and the delivery. Luckily, Ryga didn’t seem to be much of a critic in that department. He looked at me steadily.
I met his gaze and managed not to look nervous, guilty or flustered. I was too old to be flustered.
Somewhere inside my convoluted and demoralized self, I found the few pieces of chicken bone to rally. I was, after all, not a kid anymore. Not a senior either. But at least a person with enough life experience not to be falling apart just because I was surrounded by dead bodies and, for the first time in a few years, in close proximity to a really live body. A really live body who seemed more suspicious of me than sympathetic.
How could anybody look at me and think murder? I’m adorable. Then I began to muse that perhaps Ryga had watched, Darling, Detective way back when and subconsciously was associating me with murder. Didn’t he know that writers wrote this stuff and actors spoke the words, and it didn’t mean that any of them actually went around killing people? This led me into a further internal riff about how too many people attribute the brilliant words characters speak to the actors who have interpreted them. As an actor, I know that the words would drop to the floor like dead locusts once they came out of my mouth if I didn’t have the skill to make them real, but I am also old enough and experienced enough to know that the writers make the words magic an
d right. We rely on each other to make it work.
“Are you still with me?” he said.
“Of course I am,” I snapped. “I’m thinking.”
His eyes almost crossed, which made him marginally less attractive— for about five seconds.
“You’ve been doing a lot of that in the last five minutes,” he said. “Any meaningful results? Anything you would care to share?”
“You scared the hell out of me, lurking at my kitchen window,” I said. “You’re lucky I didn’t drop dead of a heart attack, and then my estate would sue you.”
“I was worried about you.” He looked annoyed, and it occurred to me that perhaps he was off-duty, which was, tee-hee, flattering. I decided to regroup and turn feisty into forlorn.
“I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough day,” I said. “I’ll never get that carpet clean. Do you know how much orientals cost?”
“I just bought one at an auction.”
“Maybe the one I just consigned. Hope you paid a mint.”
“It was a deal.”
“Damn.”
I had been selling off bits and pieces of my Bow Wow loot to pay the condo fees and assorted credit cards. The BMW was the first to go. I almost wept when the carpet, a beautiful pink, peach and brown dream, had gone out the door, but at least I still had a roof over my head.
“What colour was it?”
“What?”
“The carpet you bought.”
“A mix of brown, pink and … oh yeah, peach …”
I closed my eyes and tried to get into a zen state.
Ryga sighed and looked around the room.
“About last night …”
Which part of last night? I almost asked, but restrained myself.
“If you didn’t kill him, who do you think did?” he asked quietly.
Damn, it was hard living in a parallel universe. The one in which I had come home, innocent and devoid of any upsetting experience, and had been attacked by a home invader, and then the one in which I had discovered two dead bodies, one of which had recently been on top of me. Was life fair?
“I don’t know,” I said. This was an honest answer for both universes.
He rose from the chair without any noticeable inconvenience. Yow, he was in good shape. I should really go to the gym more often. I used to go sometimes—okay, maybe once in a while—when I had an income. I was more a yoga, free-form dancing sort of athlete.
“Call me when you think you have an idea of who might have sent Zonko,” he said. And he gave me his card.
I took his card, but I was preoccupied by this new development. Zonko? What did this mean? Was this a cute police phrase for an unknown overweight thug? (And I knew he was overweight, did I ever …)
“Zonko?”
“We ran his fingerprints. He had a history of assault and armed robbery. The judges had always been lenient because he was a caregiver for his elderly mother, who, even though she has been in jail for fraud, now is in a nursing home and relied on him for visits and financial help.”
Oh no. Mr. Size Twenty was now a loving son who had dropped dead on top of me. Could things get any worse? Should I visit Zonko’s mother in her nursing home and offer to play Trivial Pursuit every week in penance for her son trying to kill me and inconveniently dying in the process?
I slipped his card onto the side table, thinking I was doing well to have Ryga think I might actually call him. Ha. Maybe if I had just been pulled over for a parking ticket, calling him would seem reasonable and fun. But right now, further discourse was unwise and unwelcome.
Although I felt too zonko myself to volunteer to see Ryga to the door, he insisted that I did so. He said he wanted to make sure I locked the door. Was I an idiot? Of course I was planning to lock the front door. If I had a machine gun on the premises, I would have hauled it out. I am not a cool, prepared sort of gal who has a repertoire of defences. My improvisational training was pretty close to what I did in real life. Grab what you have and hope for the best. And I didn’t have a lot to work with, I mused, as I closed the door behind him.
I am an artist. I just want to be left alone. I don’t want to have to duke it out it the kitchen with carving knives.
It was past midnight.
I fell into bed and dreamed of a forest in which I was Little Red Riding Hood, wearing red knickers and not much else, being chased by a three-hundred-pound wolf with a cholesterol problem and a meat cleaver.
Retail Therapy Backfires
I struggled out of that dream to the sound of the answering machine in the living room. Damn. I had forgotten to turn down the volume— again. I was doomed to early morning messages, just because I hadn’t had the presence of mind to unplug or mute the machine before I went to bed.
I heard Mitzi’s coloratura shriek: “Lu. Pick up. It’s important.”
I debated for a moment, then thought perhaps Mitzi might have a line on some income, as in money, for me and grabbed the phone just as she paused for breath.
“I’m here.”
“Of course you are. You never go anywhere before noon.”
I lay back with the phone on my ear and waited to hear more.
“Lu?”
“Yes.” I breathed deeply and started to go back into dreamland, however yucky it was.
“Shoe sale at Valucci’s. I have a VIP pass.”
I moaned softly. Valucci’s has the best shoes. Soft kid leather in seventeen shades of pink, metallic mules with kitten heels, killer stilettos in fire engine red, magenta sandals to make you drool … my breathing speeded up and my eyes opened. What was I thinking? Where would I find the money to shop at Valucci’s today?
“Sorry, Mitzi. No dough. And I should be here for Horatio. What if he came home and I wasn’t around?”
There was a long pause. Mitzi, unbelievably, had never been a Horatio fan, even though she had made pots of money from his cute face and even cuter behind as they both jiggled onscreen. She adored him as a client, but wanted nothing to do with him as a dinner companion or fluffy friend.
“There is always money for shoes,” she said with finality. And she was right. Of course there was. Eventually. Just not now. Even a pair of discount socks would be a stretch. And shoes at Valucci’s? Impossible.
“And Horatio will wait for you if you aren’t home. You can’t be the needy one in this relationship. You have to let him know that he isn’t calling the shots. It will be empowering if you show him you aren’t waiting around for him to show up at your door.”
I wondered if Mitzi had mixed me up with somebody else, who needed dating advice.
“Horatio isn’t manipulative.”
“Are you going to say he’s a dog?”
“Dogs are sincere.”
“Sincerely oblivious to your needs. What do you need right now?”
After all I had been through in the last forty-eight hours, wasn’t I justified in fantasizing about throwing myself into deeper debt for the sake of a pair of bronzed stilettos? People who don’t love shoes wouldn’t understand this, but I needed a pair of shoes as desperately as if they were prescription medication. (Shallow and selfish, but better for me and the economy than heroin. And I want to state right now that no matter how broke I am, a monthly debit comes out of my bank account dedicated to feeding the poor in Africa. This happens even at times when a package of Horatio’s dog food has started looking good to me.) And, I reasoned, I could hang around all day waiting for Horatio and end up eating two bags of corn chips, which would be terrible for my health, and then how much good would I be to Horatio?
So I said, “Pick me up in half an hour. It doesn’t hurt to look.”
I whizzed through a shower and hair wash, the sort where you spritz shampoo on your head, rub for thirty seconds, make encouraging noises, then rinse like crazy, and I was out, on my feet, ready for action. Maybe I took a few moments to find just the right clothes, but I was justified. A major shoe sale is an event, and you need to look just right, whether or not you are
a serious customer.
I decided on a pair of Calvin Klein jeans (rust, boot cut, Salvation Army, three dollars), a matching rust T-shirt (Liz Claiborne, Women in Need, one dollar) and a muted paisley rust and green blazer (Seconds, my favourite consignment store, ten dollars) with no designer name but a tremendous cut, and a pair of Enzo Angiolini loafers (two dollars at Sally Ann, bless her).
I was so fast with my ministrations that I had time to make a quick walking tour of the cul-de-sac. I knocked on a few doors. The Mortons hadn’t seen Horatio and, furthermore, hoped they never did again, since he had sat on their kid’s bicycle. I reminded them I had reimbursed them for the bicycle, but it was clear they were still holding a grudge. I left pathetic notes in the mailboxes of the other condo owners. I made it back to my condo just as Mitzi roared up in her Mercedes,
She looked at me from under her wild red sausage curls.
“So?”
“So what?”
“Anything happening with the cute detective?”
“Nothing. He was here last night—but—”
“Last night! This is progress! What was he wearing? Boxers or Jockeys?”
She was so excited about the possibility of a liaison about which she could grill me endlessly that, if I hadn’t grabbed the steering wheel as we rounded a corner in the West Gardens, she might have taken out a woman with a walker and a semi-comatose drug addict who was stalking her.
“Mitzi! Get a grip!” I yelled. “The detective and I are not happening. He suspects me of killing—”
Suddenly, I stopped. I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to have killed. Was it Stan and or the tastelessly named Zonko?
“Killing? Killing?” She shrieked. “Who did you kill? What’s his name?”
“Zonko!” I yelled. “But I didn’t kill him.”
She started to garble a maddening mix of misinformation, and finally I put a hand in front of her pink Lancôme–laden lips and told it to her straight. That I had murdered nobody. That the police suspected me in what was, I suspected, only a casual way. And that the man who had inconsiderately died on top of me was apparently named Zonko.
Deadly Dues Page 9