Sis Boom Bah

by Jane Heller

  My nice, mellow mood darkened the minute I opened the gate and let myself in. There were at least a dozen empty beer bottles strewn across the path leading to the House of Refuge, some of them smashed and in pieces, and shaving cream had been sprayed across the building’s windows. The museum itself hadn’t been broken into, thank God, nor had any damage been done to the gift shop or to my cottage, but a bunch of drunken, mischievous kids had apparently thought nothing of hopping over a locked gate and defacing public property.

  Melinda had prepared me for the pranksters and trespassers and hormonal teenagers who would likely cause trouble now and then, just as they had a few nights before, up on the observation tower, so I was merely annoyed by this particular group’s disorderliness more than I was rattled by it. Still, it was my job to report any acts of vandalism. I called 911 and waited for the police to show up.

  Since Hutchinson Island is beyond Stuart’s city limits, it was two of my friends from the Martin County Sheriff’s Office who responded. They arrived within five minutes, saw that it was the infamous Deborah Peltz who had summoned them, and made a couple of “Oh-you-again”-type cracks, as if I spent my every waking moment placing calls to the police. But their visit was mercifully brief. They checked “the premises,” asked me a few questions, and wrote up a report. And then they moved to go.

  “Wait,” I said. “What about the beer bottles and the shaving cream? Somebody has to clean this mess up.”

  “You’re the caretaker here, right?” said one of the officers.

  “Right,” I replied.

  “Then take care of it.” He smirked.

  And off they went.

  I was perfectly capable of picking up the beer bottles and tossing them in the trash, as well as wiping the shaving cream off the windows, but it was late and I was tired and all I wanted to do was go to bed. But the cop had a point: I was the keeper there and seeing as Melinda had allowed me to stay on, the least I could do was do my job.

  I could have left everything until morning, but, afraid I’d oversleep and the volunteers (or worse, Melinda!) would come upon the scene first, I got to work. After retrieving the powerful flashlight that Ray had insisted on lending me, plus a large plastic garbage bag, a roll of paper towels, and a bucket of water, I trudged back outside and began the cleanup. I started at the north end of the building and worked my way south. I was just about to rinse off the last window, the one closest to the cottage, when I noticed that the shaving-cream graffiti artist hadn’t sprayed the stuff haphazardly. He had actually written something with the foamy lather. Something in a broad, loopy script. Something that, on closer inspection, was clearly intended to intimidate me:

  Hey, Soap Queen! Mind Your Own Business or

  This Won’t Be Your Last Close Shave!

  I gasped as I stood back from the message, my heart hammering in my chest. Obviously, whoever wrote it knew I’d worked for a soap opera. Just as obviously, whoever wrote it knew I’d been scooting around town, asking a lot of questions about Jeffrey. And most obviously, whoever wrote it knew I lived at the cottage, probably even knew I lived there alone.

  I considered going back inside and calling 911 again.

  But what if a member of the police force is behind the threat? I reminded myself? A cop who’s familiar with Jeffrey’s case and my background and the fact that I’ve been talking to people and passing information along to Detective Gillby? What if it’s someone who sees me as competition, someone who wants to be a hero and solve the murder by himself?

  I grabbed the bucket of water and splashed the shaving cream off the window. When it didn’t all come off the first time, I removed the rest with the paper towels.

  And then I did go inside and make a phone call—to Ray.

  “ ‘Lo?” he said, sounding as if I’d woken him up.

  I apologized and told him what had happened.

  “Nope. I don’t see a cop doing something like that,” he said after asking me if I was okay. “It was probably a pack of kids out for a good time.”

  “A pack of kids with knowledge of my employment history?” I challenged. “And what was that bit about minding my own business?”

  “Maybe they read about your TV career in the article that ran in the paper,” Ray theorized. “Maybe their parents talked about you over dinner. Or maybe they heard about you from one of those women you went to see today. Anything’s possible. This is a—”

  “—small town. I know,” I interrupted, thinking it was getting smaller and smaller by the minute. “It could have been a prank, I guess, but I have a feeling it was a genuine warning, Ray. I wonder if my interest in the case is making Jeffrey’s killer nervous.”

  “Jesus, Deborah. I’m more comfortable with the idea of the kids on a prank. What are you going to do now?”

  “The same things I’ve been doing. I’m going to ask questions, look for leads, and give them to Gillby. The sooner the murderer is caught, the sooner I can get on with my life.”

  “In other words, you’re ignoring the warning, if that’s what it was.”

  “I’m not ignoring it, exactly. I’m just not letting it freak me out. Much.”

  He laughed. “Do you want me to drive over there? Sleep on your couch? Sing you a lullaby?”

  “That’s sweet. No, I’ll be fine. I just had to tell someone about this. Not my mother, because I didn’t want to upset her. And not my sister, because I didn’t want her to upset me. That left you, Ray. Sorry.”

  “Why sorry? I’m glad you called. That’s what friends are for.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next morning, I made up a list of questions for my mother to ask Peter Elkin during her checkup. They ran the gamut from the innocuous (“It’s such a shame about Dr. Hirshon, isn’t it?”) to the gently probing (“Were you two close personal friends as well as colleagues?”) to the downright nosy (“Where were you the night of the murder?”).

  I knew my mother would balk at the last one, so I put an asterisk next to the question with a note below, advising: Ask this in an offhand, nonthreatening manner after telling him where you were the night of the murder; the idea is to seem as if you want to trade stories about Jeffrey—i.e., if you share your memories of him, maybe Elkin will share his.

  In addition, I included a few queries about Elkin’s love life, as in “Both my daughters are single, are you?” And “Oh, you’re divorced? Well, if you’re not going out with anybody, I’d be happy to introduce you to my girls.” The point of all that was to get Elkin either to admit that he was seeing Vicky or to pretend that he wasn’t.

  Of course, I warned my mother that the internist might be wary of telling her anything other than her temperature and blood pressure, given the fact that her “girls” were suspects in Jeffrey’s murder. But it was also possible, I reasoned, that our notoriety in connection with the case could work in our favor; that if Elkin believed that the police were pinning the murder on Sharon and me, he might be inclined to let his guard down.

  “I’ll do my best,” my mother pledged as I drove her to the appointment. “I’ve come up with loads of aches and pains, so I should be in the examining room with him for a good half hour.”

  While she was indeed being examined by Dr. Elkin and after one of the nurses in the bustling Grand Central Station-of-a-medical-practice mistakenly left open the door between the patients’ waiting room and the doctors’ offices, I slipped past everybody and tiptoed down the corridor to Jeffrey’s office. Once inside, I locked myself in and prayed that no one would come looking for me. (I hadn’t planned this part of the caper, but when I saw opportunity knocking, I couldn’t just sit there in that waiting room and thumb through a six-month-old issue of Redbook, could I?)

  As luck would have it, no one did come looking for me, not even Joan Sheldon, Jeffrey’s long-time gate keeper, who, I later learned, had taken the day off. And so I inhaled deeply and began searching the office for anything that might be important.

  The room’s decor was
pretty basic—a big leather-top desk with matching (and swiveling) leather chair, two upholstered visitor’s chairs, a pair of filing cabinets, and a credenza on which Jeffrey had displayed photos of himself—on his boat, in his Porsche, in his lab coat and latex gloves.

  Taped to the wall of the room was standard cardiologist propaganda: a large diagram of the heart and its coronary arteries and a full-color “Healthy Heart Diet” poster that attempted to make vegetables, fruits, and legumes look as appetizing as steak, cheese, and white chocolate mousse. There was also a map—or, perhaps, it was a boater’s navigational chart—of the islands of the Bahamas, Jeffrey’s favorite getaway spot, apparently.

  And then there were the requisite diplomas on the wall. The college diploma. The diploma from medical school. The diploma indicating the hard-earned specialty. You know the ones. I studied all of Jeffrey’s official-looking documents, picturing him as a young man, imagining the twists and turns his life could have taken for him to end up the way he did.

  I was focusing on his undergraduate diploma from the University of Miami, class of sixty-three, when I suddenly heard someone fiddling with the door, jiggling the handle, trying to get in.

  I stayed absolutely still.

  “I think it’s locked,” said a woman’s voice. “Joan of Arc must have locked it.”

  “What an incredible bitch,” said a second woman. “The good news is, now that Hirshon’s gone, maybe she’ll work someplace else.”

  “Don’t I wish.”

  “What should we do in the meantime though? The files we need are in there.”

  “She’ll be back tomorrow. We can get them then.”

  The two women—nurses, presumably—gave up on the door and went away.

  Boy, that was close, I thought. Too close. Maybe this wasn’t such a swell idea after all, particularly if somebody finds me in here and calls the police.

  I pressed my ear to the door to make sure the two nurses—or anyone else, for that matter—weren’t standing nearby. When I determined that the coast was clear, I quickly unlocked the door, scampered down the hall, and, as nonchalantly as I knew how, re-entered the waiting room, as if I had merely gotten up to use the facilities.

  Damn, I cursed silently, grabbing the dreaded dog-eared copy of Redbook off the magazine rack. I was actually alone in Jeffrey’s office and didn’t find a thing. Of course, if I’d had time to poke around in his files...

  Well, there was no use blaming myself about that, I decided. So I read the Redbook, a McCall’s, and a Ladies’ Home Journal, and was studying a recipe for meat loaf in Better Homes and Gardens when my mother emerged.

  “All set,” she winked, waving a wad of prescriptions at me. “Let’s beat it, dear.”

  Peter Elkin was very thorough, according to my mother. He listened to her heart, palpated her abdomen, rapped her kneecaps with that stupid little hammer, you name it. And during the examination, she quizzed him, moving down the list of questions I’d given her with the skill of a professional investigator.

  “What did he say when you asked him where he was the night of the murder?” I pumped her.

  “He didn’t answer that one at first,” she replied. “I had to use my feminine wiles.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My womanly charms,” she explained. “I may be seventy-five, but I still have them, Deborah.”

  I smiled. “Sure, you do, Mom. I was only wondering how you used them. To make Elkin talk.”

  “Oh. Well, I told him that he was much too young and handsome to tie himself down so soon after his divorce.”

  “Wait a second. You’re saying you got him to talk about his divorce?”

  “Yes, while he was checking my lymph nodes.”

  “And you got him to admit he was seeing Vicky?”

  “In so many words.”

  “How many words, Mom? This could be crucial.”

  “He said he was seeing a nurse from the hospital. Exclusively. I assumed he was referring to Vicky.”

  “A reasonable assumption. Okay, then what?”

  “This is where the feminine wiles come in.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “I tugged on his stethoscope and said, rather coquettishly, ‘Why you’re much too young and handsome to tie yourself down so soon after your divorce, Dr. Elkin.’ ‘You think so?’ he said. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘You’re one of Stuart’s most eligible bachelors now, and instead of going out and painting the town the night poor Dr. Hirshon died, I bet you were stuck at home with this nurse of yours.’ I tsked-tsked, to register my disapproval.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said I was right—he was home with her the night Dr. Hirshon was murdered. That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it, dear? Whether or not he would confirm Vicky’s alibi?”

  I nodded. Apparently, my mother, the mediator, was just as capable of being my mother, the Mata Hari.

  Later that day, Sharon blew into town for her midweek visit, but she wasn’t alone. She brought Barry Shiller along. Or, more accurately, he brought her along—in his gold Corniche. It seemed that Barry had a client in Vero Beach, an hour north of Stuart. The plan was for him to have dinner with my mother, Sharon, and me (his treat), drive to Vero after dinner, meet with his client on Thursday, and then buzz by Stuart on his way back to Boca so he could take my sister home. What a guy.

  “I’m busy tonight,” I told my mother when she reported this.

  “Deborah.”

  “I am. I’ll be sitting in my living room, staring out at the beach and counting grains of sand.”

  “Nonsense. You’re trying to avoid Sharon. And after you promised me you two would get along.”

  “No comment.”

  “I’d like to point out that tonight will be my first evening at a restaurant since the heart attack. That’s a special enough occasion for you to un-busy yourself, isn’t it, dear?”

  I sighed. “Where’s the Barrister of Boca taking us?”

  “I suggested Guytano’s, that nice, casual place next to Stuart Fine Foods. You can either meet us at the house and we can drive over together, or you can go straight to the restaurant and we’ll see you there.”

  “I’ll go straight to the restaurant, thanks. When is this party?”

  “The reservation is for seven-thirty. Under the name Shiller.”

  “I suppose he’ll be dispensing all sorts of legal advice while we’re eating, so he can pay the check and then bill Sharon for his time.”

  “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, Deborah. Your sister says he’s been extremely attentive to her.”

  “For three hundred dollars an hour, even I’d be attentive to her.”

  “Deborah.”

  “See you soon.”

  The three of them were seated at the table when I arrived at the restaurant. Barry rose from his chair to greet me, impossibly overdressed in yet another Armani suit, his brown hair soggy with the latest “styling product,” his skin bronzed and burnished and scented with a fragrance that was heavy on the musk. Sharon looked “done,” as always, but on this particular evening, she also looked radiant, like a new bride. Of course, I would have looked radiant too, if I had spent the day in a beauty salon, having a facial, a manicure and pedicure, and a touch-up to the old roots. But, since I had not, I looked my usual, thrown-together self. As for my mother, she looked ecstatic just to be alive. This was her first night out, as she had reminded me, and she was enjoying the attention being paid to her. Friends she hadn’t seen in a while stopped by our table, to inquire about her health (and to sneak a peek at the daughters who were at Jeffrey’s house the night he was murdered, I suspected). She was having such a good time that she didn’t seem to mind that Barry kept excusing himself, so he could go outside and smoke his big fat cigar, or that Sharon and I almost came to blows over the difference between tortellini and tagliatelle.

  Mostly, our conversations involved Barry’s exploits on the golf course, Barry’s frust
ration at not being able to find a car mechanic who truly understood Rolls-Royces, Barry’s decision to sell his house in the Hamptons after many “unbelievably great” summers there, and Barry’s friendships with nationally known lawyers of the type who appear regularly on Geraldo.

  Not that Sharon and I didn’t get in a word or two.

  “I’m doing the Traubman wedding the weekend after next,” she announced with some fanfare.

  “Who are the Traubmans’?” I asked.

  She stared at me, as if I were a moron. “They own half of Boca,” she said.

  “Really? Who owns the other half?” I said.

  She turned to Barry. “You see what I have to put up with?”

  He patted her arm, his diamond-and-sapphire pinky ring a sight to behold.

  Sharon went on and on about the food she had ordered for the Traubman wedding, the flowers, the music, the “intangibles.” (These included seating the mother of the bride at the other end of the dais from the mother of the groom, as they had each insisted on wearing Vera Wang.)

  She was waxing poetic about the poem she had written for the bride and groom to recite to each other, as part of their vows, when I excused myself.

  “I’m going to powder my nose,” I said.

  “Come to think of it, mine needs powdering too,” Sharon said purposefully, eyeing me with bad intent.

  We got up and went to the ladies’ room. I braced myself.

  “You’re being disrespectful to Barry,” she blasted me as we stood outside the restroom door. “I’ve watched the way you ignore him, and I won’t have it. He’s very special to me, Deborah.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “You just met him.”

  “So? We’ve become extremely close in a short time. It’s kismet.”

  “No, it’s bullshit. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Right. You know where he grew up and where he went to school, but what do you know about him? About his character? Why rush into another mess, Sharon?”