Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  “Stay away from this murder, okay? It’s not your business, Rannie.”

  “Who said it was? I simply asked a few questions.”

  But Tim was already off on a minirant. “Homicide is no game. It’s not like solving some fucking crossword. Didn’t nearly getting killed teach you anything?”

  “You are way overreacting!”

  “Am I? You get night terrors. You carry Mace wherever you go.”

  Actually, no. True, she had bought a slim metallic blue wand of Mace online. It pleased her that it looked somewhat like a shiny Col-Erase blue pencil. But she never remembered to carry the Mace nor could she figure out how to activate the nozzle.

  “You’re not Nancy Drew. You’re a copy editor. Stick to that,” Tim ranted on. She could practically hear the next words forming in his mouth—Do I make myself clear?—but before he could utter them, she jumped in the cab.

  “Don’t talk to me that way. I’m not a child,” Rannie said hotly before slamming the door. She stared straight ahead at the Plexiglas partition while supplying her address for the driver.

  The cab took off. She swiveled around. From the rear window, she saw Tim reopening his front door. His back was to her so Rannie did the only sensible, adult thing she could think of.

  She stuck out her tongue at him.

  Chapter 6

  Was her clock right? Could it really be past four? Seemed so, the late-afternoon hour corroborated by the lengthening shadows outside her window, shadows from bare treetop branches that strafed the tenement buildings across the street. Three solid hours of work—too bad Tim hadn’t witnessed her discipline and diligence! The whole afternoon she’d managed to erase Ret’s murder from her mind and concentrate on the biography of Charlotte Cummings.

  Copyediting required a particular kind of intense focus; once her Col-Erase blue pencil was in hand, it was as if she had on mental blinders and nothing existed except the printed page before her eyes. Her cell had been turned off. When she took a break and checked messages, there were three from Ellen. The first: “Rannie? Have you heard? The cops had the wrong guy! They were here at my apartment. I was the last person she spoke to!”

  The second: “Rannie, what if Ret was murdered because of something in the book?”

  The third: “Oh my God, Rannie, maybe I know something I shouldn’t, only I don’t even know what it is! I’m terrified. What if the killer knows I’m her editor?”

  The near hysteria in these last words was practically audible, so Rannie called Ellen.

  “Oh, thank God!” Ellen said as soon as she heard Rannie’s voice. “I was beginning to worry.”

  “What? That I was victim number two? Seriously?”

  “Where were you anyway?” Ellen sounded annoyed and also as if her tongue were swollen. She was lisping a little.

  “Right here. Working on the book. For you,” Rannie said with emphasis. “Rest assured you no longer are cited in the acknowledgments. Who are Audio and Gery Antioch?”

  “No clue. But Ret must have had help with the book. She couldn’t exactly go out and do interviews.”

  “Look, Ellen, the book can’t have anything to do with Ret’s murder. It doesn’t make sense; the killer wouldn’t have waited for her to finish writing it.”

  “Hold on a sec, will you?” When Ellen returned to the phone, she was no longer lisping. “Just needed water for the Ativan. And, okay, yeah, I see your point.”

  “Ret Sullivan trashed a lot of people. The woman had enemies. That’s why Mike Bellettra’s wearing an orange jumpsuit. Maybe he arranged a hit from prison.”

  “No. I’ve been watching TV all afternoon. He’s not a suspect. He issued a statement from jail. He’s angry she’s dead. He, quote, ‘didn’t want her misery to end.’ ”

  “Maybe it’s somebody from one of Ret’s other books. People can nurse grievances forever.” Yet even as those words came out of her mouth, Rannie was already discounting this line of reasoning.

  Ellen wasn’t buying it either. “Don’t tell me you think Caroline Kennedy was avenging her mother? Or Prince Charles was still mad about being called a royal twat?”

  “Money is still considered a perfectly good motive for murder, right? Maybe somebody in her family didn’t want to wait for an inheritance.”

  “She had no family. Last week she said she’d miss our daily calls now that the book was finished. Like I was her best friend.”

  “That’s pathetic. Unless of course you turn out to be a newly minted heiress.”

  “Fat chance. In the next breath, Ret swore if I said one negative word about her to the press, I’d never work in publishing again. And she meant it.” Ellen sighed. “Who knows? Maybe poor Ret was just unlucky and some neighborhood sex fiend randomly broke into her apartment.”

  This notion seemed to cheer Ellen, so Rannie saw no reason to mention that Ret’s apartment had been locked securely. Either Rannie, the Ativan, or both seemed to be having a calming effect on her. “You know who the police asked if I knew—Larry Katz. He used to be an editor at S&S . . . did you and he overlap?”

  “Yes, we overlapped.” Larry Katz was someone whom her dad would have called “a skirt chaser.” He also had been the first man Rannie had slept with after her husband bolted. Larry was more than ten years older than Rannie and chronically depressed in a Woody Allen–ish way, which for Rannie, no poster girl for mental health back then, had the oddly sanguine effect of buoying her spirits. Often she found herself trying to cheer up Larry. All in all, he’d been just what the doctor ordered—sardonic, flattering, attentive for the run of the romance. It ended amicably when he left Simon & Schuster for a small, independent West Coast publishing house.

  “God, what’s he up to?” Rannie asked. At S&S, his specialty had been New Age books—feng shui, crystals, all things woo woo—not because of any personal belief, far from it, but because the books sold like crazy and, according to Larry, all the authors were lonely women desperate for sex. “Why would the cops ask about him?”

  “No idea. He was in California for a long time but back in the city now. He’s at Dusk.”

  Dusk Books was a fourth-tier publishing house. “Dusk published the bio of Ret that’s out.”

  “Larry’s executive editor there.”

  “For real?” The Larry who Rannie had known was smart but terminally lazy.

  “Funny, right? At S&S, whenever I’d go into his office, he’d always be doing a crossword or playing Scrabble on the computer.”

  Ellen’s assessment was right on the money, and something in Ellen’s voice—a mix of amusement and exasperation—made Rannie wonder whether Ellen and Larry had also “overlapped.”

  “Thank God for Ativan. I feel better now. Sorry for wigging out before . . . how are you doing with the manuscript?”

  “Chugging right along. And I plan to put in many more hours tonight. So tell me, when do I get to the bitchy parts? Was Charlotte Cummings doing lap dances at her one-hundredth birthday party? Because so far she comes across as genuinely nice, if not the brightest gem in the jewel box.”

  “There are no bombshells. It’s clear Ret admired her. Silas takes a few hits. The book’s gossipy but more in a Liz Smith than a Kitty Kelley–ish way,” Ellen replied. “It’s a fun read, isn’t it?”

  “Then all the more reason to believe this book has nothing whatsoever to do with Ret’s murder,” Rannie said. And on that reassuring note, the conversation ended.

  When the phone rang again almost instantly, Rannie expected Ellen with some postscript. Instead it was Nate. Olivia couldn’t find her keys. They were locked out of the Werners’ town house. “So we still haven’t picked up her shit. Some friend of her mom’s has spare keys. We’re trying to find her.”

  The plan for key retrieval was all very Byzantine. Typical teenage flakiness. “We’re just hanging now.” The two of them were going to grab a burger and be back with Olivia’s “shit” around dinnertime.

  Rannie strolled back into the living room an
d dutifully plowed through another chapter of the manuscript. But she found her mind wandering. Rannie leaned back on the sofa and kneaded her neck. Why had Ret Sullivan chosen to write about Charlotte Cummings? she wondered. All Rannie could come up with was vicarious pleasure. Perhaps in chronicling such a long, gilded, and mostly happy life, Ret—housebound and lonely—felt almost as if she were experiencing the events herself. And any envy might have been tempered by the fact that at the point in time Ret Sullivan began writing the book, 102-year-old Charlotte was in essentially the same boat Ret was. A shut-in waiting to die.

  Of course, dying peacefully in bed, as Charlotte Cummings undoubtedly would do in the not-too-distant future, was a far cry from being trussed to a bed and strangled. And what was the hair thing about? It was not mentioned in the newspapers; both Rannie and the handyman had been told—emphatically told—not to share any information, especially that detail. There was something almost sacrificial, ritualistic—at least to Rannie’s mind—about the murder. Also debasing and sadistic. Rannie found herself hoping Ret had died quickly, before being tied up. Forensics could establish the sequence of events—if Ret were still alive when tied to the bed, she would have struggled; most likely there would be bruise marks or cuts on her wrists. If already dead, Ret couldn’t have put up a fight. But if that were the case, why would the killer have bothered with the kinky tableau? To make it appear a sex game gone wrong? To make it look like a more sadistic crime? All so puzzling . . . and, Rannie had to confess, morbidly intriguing. Rannie wished there was a way to get Tim’s take on the crime. What did his gut tell him? But calling him for that reason would anger him . . . and anyway why hadn’t he called? He knew she was ticked at him, so wasn’t a make-nice gesture in order?

  The siren song of sleuthing was calling. There was no sense denying it—although right away Rannie could hear her mother’s voice. “Sleuthing? Please! Concentrate on finding yourself a real job. You’re a middle-aged woman, Rannie, not some fekokte girl detective.”

  As the youngest of the three Bookman girls, Rannie had been her father’s darling. From him, a lawyer felled by a massive heart attack at fifty-two, came her love of books, respect for language, and addiction to peanut butter and jelly. As the least obedient of the daughters, Rannie was a puzzlement to her mother, Harriet, a practical-minded woman who bought at Loehmann’s, had her hair “done” once a week, always carried a plastic rain bonnet and breath mints in her purse, and now returned from every far-flung jaunt with widow friends firm in the belief that there was no better place on earth to live than Shaker Heights, Ohio. She and her mother simply didn’t get each other.

  These days for uncritical love Rannie turned to her former mother-in-law. Their relationship had not only outlasted Rannie’s marriage but also deepened after the divorce. Rannie picked up the phone and dialed, then waited to hear the familiar cultured voice. If Daisy Buchanan’s voice sounded like money, Mary Lorimer’s sounded like old money.

  “Rannie, dear! My friend, Mrs. Satterthwaite, is here and we were just talking about you. You remember her, don’t you? Daisy Satterthwaite?”

  Rannie had met Daisy Satterthwaite umpteen times, a Daisy who bore no resemblance to Fitzgerald’s glamour girl. But perhaps Mary thought Rannie’s memory was as faulty as the memory of her doddery dowager friends.

  “We’re having tea,” Mary continued, which Rannie suspected did not feature buttered scones and Earl Grey. “Tea” was probably “T” as in “Tanqueray.” “We’re about to go for a little walk to visit an old, old friend of Daisy’s.”

  “Mary, it’s dark out.” In broad daylight and stone sober, Mary was tentative navigating city streets yet still unwilling to use her cane. “Please take a cab.”

  Mary made a scoffing noise. “It’s only a few blocks away. We need the exercise.” In the background Rannie could hear Daisy say, “Cheers to that!”

  Uh-oh. The blind drunk leading the . . . It was most unusual for Mary to venture out on a Sunday evening and miss 60 Minutes.

  “Can’t you wait to visit Daisy’s friend? It’s dark out. Why not go tomorrow?”

  “Daisy is leaving for Fisher Island tomorrow. To be frank, dear, she’s worried if she doesn’t pay a visit this evening, she may not have another chance.”

  “Her friend is dying? I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes. The poor thing has been a vegetable for a quite a while, and now suddenly she’s taken a turn for the worse. Of course, she won’t even know we’re there. She’s over a hundred.”

  Say what? Suddenly Rannie felt prickly all over. Mary went on about how lovely the woman had been to Daisy at a particularly trying time in Daisy’s life and how Daisy was “absolutely religious” about visiting. But Rannie’s brain was fixated on “over a hundred.”

  “Is Charlotte Cummings Daisy’s friend?”

  “Why, yes. Do you know her?” Mary never seemed to grasp that many people in her circle were familiar names to the general public.

  “I know of her.” Were Rannie’s next words altruistic? No. But there were times when selfish gain and a good deed neatly dovetailed. “Look, I’m just sitting here. Nate won’t be home for hours. I’ll come by and visit and then walk you both over.”

  “I’d love to see you! What a darling you are!”

  “No, I’m really not. Do you think I’ll get a peek at the house?”

  “Oh, it’s something to see. Just mammoth,” said Mary who occupied, toute seule, ten vast rooms on Park Avenue. “So we’ll expect you in a little while . . . and dear—” Mary’s voice lowered to a confidential whisper. “I didn’t mention anything about your mishap to Daisy.”

  Mishap? Then it hit her. The dead body thing—that mishap.

  Right as they hung up, Rannie heard Mary reassuring Daisy that “Yes, of course there’s time to freshen your glass.”

  Chapter 7

  Rannie made herself presentable, switching from jeans to a pair of tweed trousers and pulling a brown wool turtleneck over the ratty tee she’d been wearing. In her handbag were a few blue pencils and the last of her nifty, name-engraved S&S notepads. Scribbling “I went to Grandma’s,” Rannie tore off the top sheet and left it on the front hall table where chances were fifty-fifty that Nate might spot it and less than zero that her whereabouts were of even mild interest to him.

  Her faux Barbour jacket at the ready, Rannie constructed another PB&J sandwich, which she scarfed down en route to Mary’s.

  The doorman at the limestone fortress on Eighty-Third and Park Avenue where Mary Lorimer had resided for the past fifty years picked up the receiver on the brass intercom console. His ringing announcement that “Ms. Bookman” was on her way up made Rannie straighten her shoulders and rise to her full five feet, two inches as she proceeded toward the elevator.

  Mary was at the door of her apartment to greet her. Stately, slender, and silver haired, Mary called to mind a tall Tiffany sterling candlestick, especially so this evening, outfitted as she was in pearl gray slacks and a silk blouse of the same color that tied at the neck in a bow. Rannie kissed her mother-in-law. There was always a lovely cloud of scent, warm and spicy—with a hint of cloves—hovering about Mary, yet she wore no perfume. Rannie’s kids still called it the “grandma smell.”

  Mary’s friend Daisy Satterthwaite, as stocky as Mary was slim, was on the phone, enveloped in one of the blue-striped armchairs in the smaller and less formal of the apartment’s two dens. She was holding a gold shrimp earring in one hand along with a highball.

  “Some wine?” Mary asked Rannie.

  Daisy turned and scowled. “Sorry, Barbara. Say that again. I couldn’t hear.” A pause. “We’ll pop over and only stay a minute. Yes, yes. It’ll be lovely to see you too, Barbara.”

  “It’s all too ghastly,” Daisy said a moment later while clipping her earring back on. Then she drained her highball and lit a cigarette. “I love Charlotte to pieces. She was better to me than my own mother. But, really, she ought to die already. Everybody else does. Why won’t
she?”

  Mary, ever the solicitous hostess, replenished the highball that Daisy was jiggling impatiently, then poured white wine for Rannie—a babyish drink to these hollow-legged ladies, the alcoholic equivalent of training wheels.

  As a tray of classic Wasp canapes—Triscuits with WisPride—made the rounds, Daisy reported that what had initially appeared to be “really and truly the end” was yet another false alarm. A few minutes ago, Charlotte Cummings’s fluttering 102-year-old heart had once again returned to a steady rhythm.

  “Charlotte’s like the boy who cried wolf!” Daisy declared with considerable annoyance. “I almost said so to Barbara.”

  “Barbara is Charlotte’s granddaughter,” Mary informed Rannie. “A very capable gal, owns a darling store on Madison called Bibilots. Whenever I need a gift, I go there. And she is so devoted to Charlotte. She has a hairdresser and manicurist come every week.”

  Daisy turned her jowly face to Rannie. “If you ask me, it’s ghoulish. Dressing up Charlotte as if she were some giant-sized doll.”

  On the face of it, Rannie tended to agree and, in addition, gave props to Daisy for her correct use of the subjunctive “were.”

  Daisy crushed out her cigarette in an overflowing crystal ashtray and stood so that she could dust Triscuit bristles and ashes off her slacks and blouse, which was Smurf blue and misbuttoned.

  “Well, we’d better be going. Finish your drink, Rannie,” Daisy ordered, as if scolding a child dawdling over dinner. She reached for her purse and smeared on more lipstick, then finding no comb patted her coarse blond coiffure into place.

  In the front hall, Rannie helped the ladies into their coats—Daisy’s an Autumn Haze mink circa 1955 with a rip in the lining. Whereas Mary had a soft, cool, soothing elegance, Daisy, even richer and with a far grander pedigree, fell just short of slattern, a genetic trait that Rannie liked to picture running back over generations all the way to Goody So-and-So stepping off the Mayflower in a rumpled mobcap and stained apron.

  Once outside on Park Avenue, the ladies linked arms with Rannie and began a slow march southward. Practically every ten steps either Daisy or Mary waved a fluttering kid-gloved hand at other old people doddering by, everyone interconnected through family, marriage, or club membership.