Follow the Dotted Line

by Nancy Hersage

  “Okay, do you mind of I get this off my chest right away?” the CPA asked, as the waitress exited with orders for the usual Rueben sandwich for the ladies and sweet and sour stuffed beef cabbage for the boychik. “I want to tell you what I know before we’re faced with the Russian dressing.”

  “First things first,” said Andy, ignoring her friend’s atypical anxiety. With that, she reached into her purse, pulled out a universally coveted bottle of single highland malt scotch whiskey and placed it on the table. “Am I going to get my money’s worth?” she asked.

  Lorna nodded.

  It was, Andy decided, a forebodingly humorless nod. She abandoned the banter and asked, “What do you know about Gus Andropoulos?”

  Lorna trilled her incomparably enameled nails across the tabletop, searching for an appropriate approach. She turned to Andy with a look of unsparing wariness.

  “Yikes, Lorna,” said Andy. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m preparing you.”

  “For what?”

  “For what I discovered.”

  “It’s that disturbing?”

  “It’s that weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “And to be fair, ingenious.”

  “What’s ingenious?” asked Andy, in a voice that illustrated just how contagious anxiety can be.

  “The M.O.”

  Until now, the Hasidic newbie had been making a valiant attempt to remain above the female fray, clearly treating it as idle chatter. But Lorna’s ominous demeanor was so unsettling that the future rabbi could ignore the conversation no longer.

  “What does M.O. mean?” he suddenly asked.

  “Tilda’s method of operation,” Andy explained.

  Lorna tried lamely to lighten her gloomy mood and her delivery. “You have to hand it to the woman—” she began.

  But Andy was having none of it. “No, I don’t!” she spat. “Now, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Lorna exhaled and tried again. “Well, I can say unequivocally that Gus is dead.”

  “O-kay,” Andy pronounced very slowly, with a withering cock of her head. “We kind of knew that, didn’t we? So get on with it. Did you find out how he died?”

  “I did. But that’s not the important part.”

  “The important part?”

  Unconsciously, Lorna started drumming her nails again. “The ingenious part.”

  “Enough with the nails, Lorna! What’s the ingenious part?”

  Lorna clasped her skittish hands. “Where he died,” she answered.

  Andy sat up in surprise, launching the celery stalk she’d been twirling in her fingers out of the booth and onto the floor.

  Harley beat his aunt to the salient interrogatory. “Why is that more important than how he died?” he asked.

  “Because it explains almost everything.”

  The possibility that ‘almost everything’ could be explained was so intriguing that Andy forgave herself on the spot for not having any idea exactly how. Lorna knew, and that’s all that counted. “So give it to us step by step,” she said, reverentially. “Beginning with where he died.”

  And with that, the waitress returned and unloaded their lunch platters onto the table. Harley reached for his fork.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Andy ordered. “This needs our full attention. Now tell us, Lorna. Where did Gus die?”

  “Fiji,” was the answer.

  “Oh, my god. How on earth do you know that?”

  The restless nails now hurried to the leather satchel on the booth bench beside Lorna and extracted a single sheet of paper. “Because his death certificate tells us so,” she explained, handing Andy a copy of a registered Certificate of Death from the Fiji High Commission. “We were right. Tilda had joint title to the house Gus owned in Texas, and in order to get full title, she needed to file a death certificate. And she did. The certificate was issued in Suva, the capital of Fiji. He died at an upscale resort just outside the city.”

  “How?” asked Harley, equally awed by Lorna’s performance.

  “He drowned,” she said.

  “You got all this from the death certificate?” Andy wondered.

  “Mostly. And I got a copy of something called a Medical Certificate for Cause of Death, as well.”

  “Was there an autopsy?”

  “No. The cause of death was certified by the doctor on the scene as accidental drowning, and according to the records, Gus was cremated right there in Fiji.”

  For a moment Andy and Harley sat processing the implications of Lorna’s findings. Then the trio began spontaneously ping-ponging the advantages of Tilda’s modus operandi across the table at one another.

  “So if you die in a foreign country, there is no state or county record of your death in the U.S.,” Andy served.

  “And if you’re on vacation and it looks like an accident,” Lorna volleyed, “there are few questions and no autopsy.”

  “And who wants to ship a body home?” Harley returned. “You cremate the body and eliminate any future possibility of questions.”

  It didn’t take much to keep this little ball of impeccable logic in the air.

  Andy took another aggressive swing at it. “Drowning an old man can’t be that difficult. I have no doubt she could do it. Maybe with the help of a little booze.”

  Lorna was ready and waiting. “And if you succeed one time, why not try another?”

  “And another,” Harley lobbed back.

  “And another,” said Andy, slamming home the point and scoring the first truly plausible explanation of what had happened to Tilda’s previous husbands—and what had happened to Mark. “And that’s how Fiji explains everything, right?”

  “Right,” Lorna confirmed. “Because it explains how she could have killed all four men and no one has been able to assemble the assorted crimes and put them together.”

  “But if she killed them all in Fiji—”

  “No, no,” countered the CPA with uncharacteristic certainty. “I’m sure each man got his own international vacation. Anyone as clever as Tilda would never use the same country twice.”

  Andy was trying to imagine the kind of uninhibited creativity it would take to dream up a plan like this and the sociopathic compulsion to execute it. “I don’t understand this woman,” she whispered with respectful revulsion. “I really don’t.”

  “Why should you? Why should any of us?” Lorna pronounced with indignation. “The woman’s a serial killer.”

  This simple and rather obvious observation came as a jaundiced jolt to the writer of so much mediocre fiction. For someone who had put up her share of murder and mayhem on a television screen, she had never really contemplated the seemingly innocuous nature of ending the lives of actual human beings. Nor had she realized how easy it was to habitually kill people and go completely undetected.

  Harley was beginning to nervously pinch the hair at the base of his chin and wipe moisture from the rim of his felt hat. “Why don’t we just go to the police?” he demanded.

  Alarmingly, Lorna turned her eyes on the boy with a fierceness no one was expecting. “I did,” she said. “Those jackasses. I did!”

  Chapter 26

  The Warm Waters of Denial

  Andy issued a rare dispensation and told Harley to eat his cabbage before it got cold. She and Lorna didn’t have the stomach for their sandwich yet.

  “What do you mean you talked to the police?” Andy wanted to know.

  “I’ve been on the Community Policing Advisory Board in the Valley for years,” Lorna reminded Andy. “All those meetings and fund-raisers. Fat lot of good it did me.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Bill Lornier and Collin Cinco. I took them to lunch.”

  “Really?”

  “I paid to have them make me feel like a fool.”

  It was difficult to tell whether Lorna was more upset by what she had learned about Tilda or what she had learned about the police. Whichever it was, Andy
was certain she had never seen her friend so agitated.

  “What, exactly, did they say?”

  “That at this point, there was nothing they could do.”

  “For god’s sake,” Andy snapped. “What point does this have to get to?”

  It’s not that the two LAPD sergeants had been rude or even dismissive, Lorna explained. It was their painstakingly polite condescension that was so aggravating.

  “The way it generally works,” Lornier had told her, “is that the Department begins with a crime and then sets out to find a criminal. What you’ve got is someone you believe may be a criminal, and you want us to help you work backward and find a crime.”

  “But I think I’ve finally found one,” Lorna had explained.

  “No, you’ve found a possible method for committing a crime,” the policemen had countered, alternating sentences between them. “But there is no evidence at all that any crime occurred. This guy, Gus, might have really drowned. And even if he was murdered, Fiji is a little out of our jurisdiction.”

  Both men had tried to camouflage a smile with simultaneous sips of coffee, but the accountant had seen their smirks.

  “In fact, all of this—even the cabin in Big Bear—is out of our jurisdiction,” Lornier had added.

  “Did you ask them about contacting the FBI?” Andy interrupted.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And?”

  “And Collin Cinco got the punch line on that one,” Lorna sighed, ruefully. “He said, and I quote, ‘The feds pretty much like to start with a crime, too, and then work their way back to the criminal.’ This time they just chuckled out loud.”

  The personal deflation she had suffered while lunching with the men in blue visibly reoccurred, as Lorna slumped forward, elbows on the table, head in hands.

  Andy shoved the corned beef on rye in front of her friend. “Eat. We need to think this through,” she instructed.

  They ate in silence, except for one unnecessary and obviously misdirected burst of anger in which Andy barked at Harley to wipe a dollop of Russian dressing from his beard.

  “It’s not even your dressing,” she told him.

  “I just wanted to try it,” he said, in a half apology.

  “Humph,” was the best she could do.

  Dessert was a shared plate of cream cheese blintzes with strawberry jam. When it had been wiped clean, Andy once more ventured the question every American female has been programmed to ask her closest friend in moments of crisis.

  “Tell me,” she began. “Just tell me again, Lorna. Am I crazy?”

  “No. This woman is definitely killing people. I would swear to it.”

  “Then we really need to do something. I mean, something more.”

  “Let’s order coffee,” Lorna suggested. “Because I’ve thought a lot about that.”

  “You’ve got a plan?”

  “More of a strategy.”

  The strategy made the only logical sense one could make out of an increasingly idiotic situation. Lorna laid it out over two cups of decaf and Harley’s first egg cream.

  “I think if we could demonstrate that each of these four men died while on vacation with Tilda in a foreign country and that she was the sole beneficiary of these deaths, the police or the feds or whomever would be forced to look into it.”

  “Isn’t that still working backward from the criminal to the crime?” asked Harley, who was grasping this whole thing with unexpected clarity.

  “Agreed,” Lorna said. “However, it’s still the only approach we’ve got. Even the police should agree that nobody has that many husbands die ‘accidentally’ while on vacation. Nobody.”

  “So what would we need to do to find out how and where these guys died?” Andy asked.

  “I guess we’d have to do what we did with Gus. Try to hunt down a family member, see if the guy owned any real estate, and then contact the county recorder where the property is located to see if Tilda was on the title. If she was and she filed a death certificate, then we contact the country that issued the death certificate to see what happened.”

  “That’s a helluva lot of work,” Andy groaned.

  Lorna nodded. “I know. But I don’t see any other way. Do you?”

  Andy grimaced in a let’s-all-run-a-marathon sort of way. “Damn Mark! I can’t believe he’s making me go through all this. The guy’s made as big a mess of his death as he did of his life. This could take months.”

  “I thought you thought Uncle Mark wasn’t dead yet,” Harley said, unable to mask his confusion under all that facial hair.

  “Well, if he isn’t, I’ll be ready to kill him myself by the time this is over,” Andy snorted, making her sound way nastier than she felt about the situation. In point of fact, she wasn’t all that sure how she felt about the situation. As time went on, it was more and more likely that Mark really was dead. And somewhere deep down under the warm waters of denial, floated the icy truth: she already knew he was; she just couldn’t admit it yet. “Sorry. That was uncalled for. But this whole thing makes me so mad.”

  The eyebrows perching pensively below the skullcap jumped plaintively.

  “What?” Andy said, trying not to bark at him again.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Harley. I’m not mad at you. This is married people’s baggage. And it’s all filled with sh—garbage. Go ahead. What did I say that upset you?”

  “Nothing. Really. I was just wondering why we didn’t, you know, take the easy way.”

  “The easy way?”

  “It would sure save time.”

  Now Andy was the one who was having trouble masking her confusion. “What are you talking about, Harley?”

  “Tilda’s passport. Wouldn’t that have those stamps you get when you go someplace outside the country?”

  “Passport stamps?” Andy repeated.

  “Like on Rick Steves.”

  “Oh, my god,” she gasped. “You watch PBS?”

  He was about to answer but never got the chance.

  “Tilda’s passport,” Lorna crooned, her own eyebrows shooting nearly to her hairline. “Of course! We could figure out exactly where she’s been traveling by checking her passport stamps!” Feeling an unanticipated surge of adrenaline, the kind that comes after you’re sure the game is over and then discover it isn’t—quite yet, Lorna sat up and blew a spontaneous kiss across the table to Harley. “One wonders what goes on inside that head of yours!” she marveled.

  “No, one doesn’t,” Andy sniped.

  Lorna pointed a finely filed nail at her friend. “Shut up, Andrea. And start thinking about how we can get ourselves back into that cabin in Big Bear this weekend.”

  In the days that followed, two unrelated yet significant events took unexpected turns and ultimately collided with one another. The first was Harley Davidson’s sudden illness. Suffering from migrating body aches and projectile vomiting, the boy was convinced he had contracted food poisoning from the stuffed cabbage. It made no difference that not one other person had reported getting sick that day or that the restaurant had an ‘A’ rating from the city health department; Harley was convinced the Jewish delicatessen had brought him to his first and only near-death experience. He reacted by shaving his beard (which was a repository for everything that came out of his mouth) and removing his skullcap, even during daylight hours. And thus appeared the initial cracks in his newly established spiritual foundation.

  The second event was an impromptu family meeting at Mitch’s house, spurred by a phone call to his mother announcing he had set a date for Mark’s funeral.

  “You what?” Andy asked.

  “I have a date. Just come over on Friday after work, and we’ll talk about it,” Mitch said. “Berkeley will be here for the weekend.”

  Berkeley was Mitch’s daughter from a marriage that never quite happened nearly twenty years ago. By avoiding matrimony and with it cohabitation, Mitch and Berkeley’s mother, Sara, had remained close friends, and Berkeley had been s
pared a childhood of miserable parents.

  “You know, Mitch, I’m still working on finding out more about what happened to your dad,” she ventured.

  “Oh, right. How’s that coming, by the way?”

  Candor was a waste of time. If she told him about the upcoming break-in at the cabin in Big Bear this weekend, not to mention the previous one, he’d have his lawyer drawing up commitment papers before she hung up.

  “Nothing definite to report, unfortunately,” she equivocated. “Still trying to put the pieces together about exactly what happened.”

  “But Dad is dead, right?”

  “Well, that’s my concern, Mitch. Probably.” She thought about it. “Most likely,” she amended. Then just to be fair, she added, “At least, I can’t find any evidence he’s alive. And all Tilda’s other husbands most definitely preceded him in death. And probably not by natural causes.”

  “Oh, you know that for sure now?” said Mitch, a little taken aback. “I thought the Black Widow thing was just exuberant speculation on your part.”

  “Are you being snide?”

  “No. I’m just asking if you found some kind of proof. Because, if you did, you damn well better call the police, Mom. You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?”

  Redirection was a family art, and she rendered it as well as any of her children. “It’s all about following the paper trail,” she half-lied. “I promise I will call the police once I have something definite. In the meantime, I just thought you might like to wait and see what I come up with before we have the memorial service.”

  “Sorry, but if we’re going to make this funeral happen, it has to be now or never. Or the whole idea will just slip away. We’ve got a window of opportunity, Mom, and I say we take it.”

  “What window?”

  “I’ll tell you Friday. Okay?”

  Andy surrendered. “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  “By the way, is Harley ambulatory yet?”

  “He’s lost ten pounds. But, yes, he’s out of bed and walking around.”

  “Did he put his beanie back on?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t another crisis of faith?”

  “God only knows, Mitch. I can’t keep track.”