Death by Killer Mop Doll (An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery)

by Lois Winston

  “You!” said one by way of recognition. He holstered his gun. His partner did likewise. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Can I move?” I asked, barely opening my mouth to speak.

  The first detective nodded.

  Before I could answer his question, Mama poked her head out from the bedroom. “I thought I heard someone.” Then recognizing the detectives said, “Oh hello, boys. Have you caught my poor Lou’s killer already? Was it that nasty you-know-who, like I suspected?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the one on the left. The two were pretty much interchangeable, except for a few pounds and even fewer inches. They both sported graying buzz cuts that screamed marine sergeants, right out of central casting, the ones from World War II-era movies. Only these guys wore off-the-rack navy gabardine instead of khakis or camouflage. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember their names, although I’m sure they had introduced themselves prior to questioning me yesterday.

  “What are the two of you doing here?” asked the shorter one, short being a relative term since both towered over six feet.

  Although he’d directed the question to me, Mama answered, “We came to pick up some clothes for poor Lou’s funeral. And maybe find some clues to the identity of his killer.”

  “Why didn’t you open the door when we knocked?” Again, addressed to me, but this time by the taller, slightly thinner detective, and this time Mama didn’t answer.

  Instead, she turned to me. “Why didn’t you answer the door, Anastasia?”

  I nodded toward the entertainment unit. Symphony No. 4 had long since ended, replaced by the 1812 Overture. “May I?” When the shorter detective waved his consent, I reached for the volume control and lowered Mr. Tchaikovsky’s volume down to that of background music.

  I wanted to roll my eyes and exclaim, “Duh!” but decided sarcasm directed toward men with guns wasn’t the brightest move. Instead, I simply said, “I’m sorry, detectives, but I didn’t hear your knock over the rockets and cannon fire.”

  “Where are my manners?” exclaimed Mama with a clap of her hands. “Would you boys like some coffee or tea?”

  The two detectives exchanged a quick glance. Then the shorter one said, “That would be great, ma’am. Coffee. If it’s no trouble.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  Mama bustled off to the kitchen, and the two detectives turned their full attention to me. “Clues?” asked the taller one.

  “Or destroying evidence?” asked the shorter one.

  I glared at both of them. They’d certainly established good cop/bad cop pretty quickly. “Clues. I have nothing to hide, and neither does my mother. Frankly, it never occurred to me that you hadn’t already searched Lou’s apartment. I was hoping to discover something you might have overlooked, given my mother knew Lou and you didn’t.”

  “The way we understand it,” said the shorter detective, “your mother only met Lou a few weeks ago. How intimately could she have known him?”

  “If you’re inferring what I think, detective, you’re not only way out of line, your skills are questionable. What would be her motive? Wouldn’t it make more sense to kill Lou after they’d married? Not to mention after he’d had a chance to change his will?”

  “How do you know he hadn’t already changed it?” asked the taller detective.

  I pointed to the desk. “Bottom drawer. Filed under W. And while you’re checking, his life insurance policy is also there. Filed under I. When you’re through making sure I’m not lying, there’s something I found that might interest you.”

  The taller detective strode across the room to the desk, opened the file drawer, and thumbed through the folders until he found both documents. After checking them out, he turned to his partner, “She’s right. The vic left everything to charity.”

  “As I could have told you,” I said.

  “What else did you want to tell us?” asked the shorter one.

  I still held the uncrumpled sheet of paper between the tips of my thumb and index finger. “Something either angered or frightened Lou Monday night.”

  “What makes you think that?” asked the taller detective.

  I told him what Mama had said about the state of the apartment and pointed to the empty bottle of Scotch. “He downed the entire bottle. The cardboard packaging is still on the kitchen counter.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, ma’am,” began the taller detective, “but maybe the guy was just having second thoughts about—” He cocked his head in the direction of the kitchen where Mama was still puttering around with the coffee.

  “Or maybe after he came back from bringing my mother home, he opened his mail and found this.” I extended my arm and dangled the paper in front of him. “I found the empty envelope on the sofa with the other mail. He’d balled the contents up and hurled it across the room.”

  The detective withdrew a plastic evidence bag from his pocket. Grabbing the typed message by the corner, he dropped it into the bag before reading it, then passed the bag to his partner. “We’ll need to fingerprint you to eliminate your prints,” he said.

  “No need. I made sure not to leave any.”

  Before either of them could say anything further, Mama returned to the living room. She carried a tray laden with a coffee pot and all the necessary accoutrements—down to china cups and saucers. Mama always entertained in a manner befitting the descendant of Russian nobility (according to her) and the former social secretary of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In other words, when

  it came to entertaining, Mama never did anything half-assed, even when entertaining cops looking to nail her or her daughter for murder.

  I grabbed the tray from her and set it down on the coffee table. Mama positioned herself in the center of the sofa and began her hostess-with-the-mostest ritual. “How do you take your coffee, Detective Phillips?” This was directed to the taller detective, the good cop. I made a mental note.

  I also noted something else I hadn’t noticed before. Phillips sported the most miniscule soul patch I’d ever seen. Or maybe he hadn’t looked in the mirror when he shaved that morning.

  In my book, soul patches took first place as the most dumb-ass male fashion statement ever conceived. And that includes bowties and Nehru jackets. Every time I saw a guy sporting a soul patch, I had an uncontrollable urge to grab a razor and a can of shaving cream and sneak up on him. A nearly microscopic soul patch was the most dumb-ass of all the dumb-ass soul patches to date.

  “Black, ma’am,” he answered. Mama handed him his coffee, then offering him a plate and napkin, said, “Please, help yourself to some cookies. My poor Lou had such a sweet tooth, and these will go stale if no one eats them.”

  She picked up a second cup and began to pour. “And you, Detective Marlowe?”

  Wait a minute. Phillips? And Marlowe? I must have been brain dead when these guys questioned me yesterday. How else to explain forgetting such a pairing. Obviously, someone at the NYPD had a delicious sense of humor.

  And let’s not forget the God of Strange Coincidences. How else did I explain coming across three such weird cop pairings in the last three months? First Simmons and Garfinkle. Then Batswin and Robbins. Now Phillips and Marlowe. Either Morris County and the NYPD were in cahoots, or this was the coincidence to beat all coincidences.

  “Same for me, ma’am,” said Marlowe, answering Mama. Shorter cop. Bad cop. Soul patch-free cop. “Black.” Mama repeated her routine for Detective Marlowe, handing him his coffee, then offering the cookies.

  As she poured coffee for me and herself, I wondered if either cop got the joke. A glance at their stern faces told me these guys had slept in late the day God passed out the humor genes.

  Mama turned to the detectives and asked, “Now what have you boys learned in your investigation so far?”

  Instead of answering her, Marlowe studied the china cup and saucer. “Kind of frou-frou for an old bachelor, wouldn’t you say, Phillips?” He turned to Mama. “More your styl
e. You recently purchase them, Mrs. O’Keefe?”

  “Goodness, no! This is Royal Albert bone china. The Duchess pattern. It belonged to Lou’s grandmother on his mother’s side. He treasured it. Now there’s no one left in his family. I suppose the lawyers will just sell it all off.” Mama heaved a huge sigh. “Such a shame, don’t you think, boys?”

  They both nodded. Seriously. Solemnly. Me? I felt an eye roll and a huge belly laugh coming on at the thought of Lou Beaumont sticking out his chubby pinky finger to sip daintily from a Royal Albert Duchess coffee cup.

  Twenty minutes later Marlowe and Phillips had wolfed down every last cookie crumb while divulging no information in regard to their investigation into Lou Beaumont’s death. They then told Mama and me we’d have to leave the apartment while they conducted their investigation. Mama finished packing up the clothes she’d picked for Lou’s funeral, and we headed back to Campbell’s.

  _____

  “What did the note say?” asked Cloris when I caught her up the next morning at work. We’d ducked into the break room where she deposited a still warm loaf of chocolate-cherry bread fresh from the test kitchen.

  “A CORPSE TELLS NO TALES.”

  Cloris paused from slicing the bread. “Whose corpse? Lou’s? And what sort of tales?”

  I grabbed a slice and shrugged. “Beats me. The possibilities are endless. However, I’m guessing Lou knew what the note referred to, judging from the bottle of Scotch he downed.”

  Cloris finished slicing the bread and took a piece for herself while I poured coffee. “But he could have polished off the Scotch prior to opening his mail,” she said as we sat down at the table.

  “True, but it seems more likely the note led to the drinking. Mama said Lou was in a great mood when he took her home.” I skipped the part about why Lou had been in a great mood. The thought grossed me out enough. No need to fill Cloris’s head with the image of Mama and Lou dancing the naked horizontal Mambo.

  “The note could have something to do with Lou’s relationship with Mama or the show’s new format or any number of things we’re unaware of,” I continued, grabbing another slice. “This is incredible! Whoever first came up with the idea of marrying chocolate and cherries should qualify for sainthood.”

  Cloris nodded her agreement as she gobbled up another slice.

  “After all,” I continued, “what do we really know about Lou Beaumont?”

  Cloris closed her eyes and mulled for a moment. Or maybe she was just having a gastronomic orgasm. I know I was. “Only what you’ve heard from your mother and what we’ve heard from Sheri,” she finally said. “And I wouldn’t put much stock in anything Sheri said about Lou. The woman has visions of her own grandeur.”

  “Mama’s not the most reliable source, either,” I reminded her. “Which leaves us knowing very little about the man.”

  “Nothing else turned up at his apartment?”

  I wolfed down another slice before I answered her. “The man owned a huge collection of classical CDs, treasured his grandmother’s Royal Albert china, and named the American Heart Association as the beneficiary of both his will and his life insurance policy. Other than that, he’s still pretty much a mystery to me. And I’m guessing to the detectives investigating his murder, as well.”

  “If the note refers to the new show format,” said Cloris, “we’re back to our same list of suspects—Ray, Monica, or Vince.”

  “But what if it refers in some way to Mama? What if the corpse didn’t refer to Lou? Maybe the killer wanted someone else dead, not Lou.”

  “If that’s the case, the killer might be someone we haven’t even met. Certainly if he or she wanted Lou to end his relationship with your mother, the killer would’ve gone after her, not Lou.”

  I didn’t even want to consider that possibility. Even with all her eccentricities and the headaches they caused me, I couldn’t imagine life without Mama. “My gut tells me Lou’s death is connected to the changes he made to the show.”

  Cloris chuckled. “Oh? Was that what the rumble I just heard meant? And here I thought it was your gut demanding the last slice of chocolate-cherry bread. I guess that means you don’t want it?”

  Before Cloris could lay claim to the last slice of chocolate-cherry bread, I reached behind my chair, grabbed the knife from the counter, and cut the remaining piece in half. “Guess again,” I said, offering her one half as I popped the other half into my mouth.

  _____

  Later that afternoon Mama called me at work.

  “Campbell’s phoned,” she said.

  I heard the panic in her voice. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “The coroner released poor Lou’s body to them a few minutes ago. We’ve scheduled the funeral for tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock.”

  I sensed a huge problem about to be dumped on yours truly. Almost reluctantly, I asked her, “And?”

  “They said they’d be happy to contact Lou’s friends, family, and coworkers for me if I emailed over a list.”

  And there was the problem. “But you don’t have a list, do you? What did you tell them?”

  “That I’d get right back to them. Anastasia, you have to help me. What am I going to do? We can’t hold a funeral for someone as important as poor Lou and only invite a handful of people from his show.”

  The only person I knew who might be able to bail out Mama was the one person I knew Mama didn’t want at the funeral, let alone want to speak to ever again. In Mama’s eyes, Sheri was Suspect Numero Uno. “There is someone you could contact,” I said.

  “That woman.” Mama spat out the words. “I was hoping you’d call her for me, dear. She’s much more likely to respond in a favorable manner to you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because she needs you. What would that show be without you?”

  Mama always did have a very inflated sense of my importance to the magazine. And now the show. But what could I do? “I’ll phone her right now. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Thank you, dear. You know I wouldn’t put you in the middle of this if there were any other way.”

  “I know, Mama.” Actually, there had been another way. Mama could have kept her nose out of Lou’s remains and left all the arrangements to his executor. Or Trimedia. But that’s not Mama’s way. In her eyes, she and Lou were as good as married, and that meant she was in charge of sending him off to the afterlife in the manner she had decided he’d want.

  I fortified myself with another cup of coffee before dialing Sheri. What did I have to barter? How much more of my nonexistent free time would I have to hand over to the Simon—or more aptly, Simone—Legree of daytime television?

  However, I needn’t have worried. Sheri floored me with her response. “Don’t worry yourself, Anastasia. I’d be happy to take care of it,” she said after I explained the situation. “I’ve got everything on a database. Just give me the e-mail address, and I’ll zip it right over to them.”

  Eight

  Trimedia had issued a memo late the day before, stating that the American Woman staff would not be docked for taking the day off to attend Lou’s funeral. As a matter of fact, they expected us to show up.

  No, the Patron Saint of Working Stiffs hadn’t performed a miracle attitude adjustment on the suits in charge. They were more concerned with a show of solidarity than losing a day’s worth of work from us. To their way of thinking it was important to come across as a family in mourning for the loss of a loved one. Not to mention honoring Lou’s memory by going on with the show as planned. They actually presented us with talking points in case any of us was buttonholed by local media.

  Besides, they knew damn well we’d all have to bust our asses to make up the lost time. In the magazine business production schedules rule. Neither rain nor sleet nor death of a television producer would keep us from going to press and shipping on time.

  Mama, on the other hand, just might hold up the funeral. I stepped out of the shower to hear her banging on my bedroom door. �
��Anastasia! Let me in!”

  Mama barged in the moment I unlocked the lock, Catherine the Great on her heels. Ralph flew in behind both of them and took up residence on a curtain rod where he began a stare-off with the corpulent kitty.

  Mama was already dressed in one of her classic Chanel suits, ebony crepe with matching satin piping and black faux pearl buttons, the same suit she’d worn to each of her husband’s funerals, even though she hadn’t made it as far as the altar this time around.

  Meanwhile, I stood barefoot and dripping wet with only a towel wrapped around my torso as I waited to hear what new catastrophe had struck Casa Pollack. I’d bet my last nickel that even the Octomom has less chaos in her house each morning, but I no longer had any nickels left to bet.

  “Really, Anastasia,” said Mama, “I don’t know why on earth you have to lock your bedroom door. It’s not like you’re living in a dormitory.”

  No, it’s worse. I had more privacy when I shared a dorm suite with three other students. “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until I was dressed, Mama?”

  “Did you see what your sons are wearing?”

  I hadn’t even seen my sons yet this morning, let alone what they were wearing. “Why? What’s wrong with the way they’re dressed?”

  “Jeans and Tshirts are totally inappropriate for a funeral. I’m shocked that you would allow them to dress that way for such a solemn event.”

  “Now, music, sound, and sing your solemn hymn,” squawked Ralph. “Much Ado About Nothing. Act Five, Scene Three.”

  Catherine the Great hissed her displeasure with the quoted passage, but I thought Ralph, as always, was pretty much on target.

  “What makes you think the boys are going to Lou’s funeral? They barely knew the man.” Come to think of it, aside from that one night Lou showed up in my living room and spent most of the time cowering from Ralph, I couldn’t remember a single instance when he, Alex, and Nick were together.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, dear. Lou was going to be their grand—

  father.”

  Look who’s being ridiculous! I could play this one of two ways—say what was on my mind or keep the peace as best I could. I chose the coward’s way out. “I know, Mama, but the boys can’t miss school today. They’re both in the middle of exams.”