Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  He stood up and brushed himself off. “Apologies, Miz Pepper, but tha’s not it at all, not even close. But after all this time, an’ all those clever guesses, I thought you deserved the thrill of accomplishment, of triumph. Even if short-lived.”

  I took a deep breath, then I shrugged. He’d listened, which was all I’d really asked of him.

  We both sat back down. “Anyway,” I said, “this man I’d never seen before stopped me. He knew my name.”

  Mackenzie looked wary, ready to spring, ready to react, but he kept his silence.

  “Turned out his name’s Arthur. That’s all I know.” I fished in my purse, then in my pockets until I found the engraved card, and I passed it over to C-not-for-Cisco. “He was carrying a leather-bound copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and he warned me not to be an investigative reporter, and let me know he’d been in the movie.”

  Mackenzie frowned. “He’s an actor?”

  “In the movie house. With me. The whole thing gave me the creeps.” I wasn’t being clear, wasn’t able to communicate the negative force field around Arthur, the fear I’d felt—even if it did not seem justified.

  “Which aspect gave you the creeps?” Mackenzie asked. “His moviegoing, his taste in reading, or this pompous business card?”

  “He’d followed me.”

  “When you say he stopped you, what precisely did he do?”

  “Came up beside me, said my name, talked to me.”

  ‘Talked. In a normal voice?’

  “Okay, right, yes—but that’s not the—”

  “Did he touch you?”

  I shook my head. “Not then. Later, he touched my forearm.”

  “Touched or grabbed or held?”

  “Touched, but I felt as if—”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “We were alone. Nobody else around.”

  “Yes, but did he threaten you? Do anything intimidating?”

  “He laughed at me, kind of.” I was not going to admit I’d screamed “Fire!” in the middle of the street. Mackenzie continued to wait. “He said investigative reporting wasn’t a healthy occupation.”

  “Luckily it isn’t yours.”

  “The article, C.K. That’s what he meant.”

  “The one you haven’t written?”

  I hated this. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t care and didn’t care, it was that I wasn’t giving him any reason to care. “I was upset!” I said

  “Obviously. How can I help you? I’m not clear on this.”

  There was one part he’d be clear on. “He knew about the gun.”

  And indeed, Mackenzie sat up straighter. “The gun? The derringer in your bag?”

  I could hear the lyrics of the new hit tune: “The derringer in Mandy’s bag was a heavy, heavy load, oh, oh…”

  “Is that what you mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s weird. How’d he find out? Unless…”

  “He wanted me to let him know if you returned it to me. He wanted to look at it, and he offered to pay.”

  “Thought it wasn’t yours in the first place,” Mackenzie said. “You acted like the sight of it gave you hives. Why would we give it back to you unless we were sadists?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He scratched his head, stood up, and stretched, a sight I usually enjoy watching, but the man’s logic was getting on my nerves and the taller and longer and leaner he made himself look, the more of him there was to annoy me.

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  “Unless what what?”

  “You wondered how Arthur found out about the gun and me, unless. You stopped there.”

  “Oh, right. Unless that’s what—somebody mentioned that Dr. Reed On the Air’s first ‘true story’ last night was about a high school teacher who taught in a privileged private school, insulated from the real world, but who identified closely with the armed, more violent segment of society—that’s me—and got involved writing about a ‘colorful subculture of the city’ through a colleague, and through that activity, with a murder of her own. That’s how she put it—seems I’ve got my murders and you’ve got yours. And this teacher-writer—Gladys, she called you—was named as an accomplice—”

  “I never was!”

  “That’s what On the Air said—and a gun had been found on her person, but she still said she knew nothing, yah-ta-ta. Suggested all kinds of mental deviations, like multiple personalities, dissociation, pathological identification with bigger, braver folk—that’s me again, I take it. Anybody interested, given enough brains to recognize which colorful subculture has recently had a murder, that person asks a few questions in that colorful subculture about who was writing something, that’d be it. The guy who mentioned it to me had figured it out. On the Air seemed to feel that your ‘intimate relationship with a law-enforcer’ and ‘intimate knowledge of the seamier side of urban life’ had so frightened you that you no longer were in touch with your own actions.”

  “I’m crazy? Is that what she said?”

  “She said you found a gun in your purse that was most likely involved in a murder. Bet that’s how Arthur tracked you.”

  He came around to my side of the table and massaged my neck. It felt too good and too necessary for me to cry halt even though I could feel myself being not only literally but figuratively manipulated. He wasn’t taking my encounter seriously enough, wasn’t even taking Arthur’s tracking of me via the radio shrink as potentially frightening. If I hadn’t been so upset by him, I might have even sunk into the pleasant twilighty grogginess his hands encouraged.

  “Let me ask you,” he said as he carefully kneaded. The muscles of my neck and upper back had been replaced by high tension wires at some point today. “Say you weren’t such a city girl. How did this encounter differ from somebody passing the time of day with you?”

  “He—I—there are rules about how people approach—the man knew I’d be frightened. He meant me to be. He’d been in the movie with me! He told me to stick to teaching!”

  I could hear Mackenzie’s deliberately slowed-down breaths. “I know teachin’s hard and all, but I guess sticking with it is scarier than I am capable of understandin’.”

  “Never mind. You know he was creepy, and so do I. And that it had to do with this. These—because he referred to murders. Plural. Mummers. Plural. So Ted Serfi is somehow involved. He mentioned blood sausage.”

  “How?”

  It was much easier to remember the fear, the uncertainty, the effect of the words than the precise order of what he’d said. I tried to reconstruct the moment. “He asked if I thought Ted Serfi had been turned into blood sausage the way people said.” I did a double take. “You don’t think that thing on the table could be—”

  “I think Serfi’s at the bottom of a river with weights on his feet. He ran with a fast crowd. Probably didn’t run fast enough.”

  Still and all, I didn’t want to look in the direction of the white box.

  “I know it frightened you.” Mackenzie’s voice floated down to me serenely as his hands kneaded my knotted muscles. “Don’t mean to dismiss that. But there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it. I could call him and say, ‘Hey, Artie, stay away from my girl.’ ”

  I revved up for more precise objections, but he talked right over my hostile pfuts.

  “I could challenge him to a duel, but that seems archaic. I could check him out, which I fully intend to do, an’ whatever I find, I will heartily use against him for scarin’ you. I will scare him back, I promise. But meantime, doesn’t sound like a single thing he did’s illegal, an’ I’m sure he knew that. Creepy, impolite, not usin’ city etiquette. But the rules say he has to break the law before I bother him.”

  “I wish I knew what’s going on.”

  “He wants to see the gun, that’s all? Didn’t want to buy it or take it?”

  “He said he’d pay to see it.”

  “He might well be involved in Jimmy Pat’s
murder, and he hid his weapon and can’t figure how it turned up—in your bag, and he has to see it to verify it.”

  “Unless he has to see it to verify it belongs to somebody else. He asked me what it looked like, as if he’d recognize some marking or whatever the police couldn’t.”

  “I’d say let’s set up such a viewing, except what you and he don’t know,” Mackenzie said, “is that the gun in your bag wasn’t the murder weapon after all. It did not kill Jimmy Pat. Ballistics tests show completely different markings.”

  I swiveled around to see his face, check whether he was joking. He certainly didn’t look it.

  I stood up. The massage had been heavenly, and my neck and back did feel looser, but now I needed to move, to pace, to hope my brain kicked into gear. Luckily, the loft was a great pacing arena, with lots of sights around the course. I did the kitchen area, the living-room sofa area, the table area, the office—in each case, a piece of furniture or two equaled a room’s worth of definition—the bedroom divider, the sound system, the TV, the bookshelves, which I suppose I should have called the library.

  No metaphorical light bulbs blazed above my head. I tried saying it out loud. “Somebody planted a gun that isn’t the murder weapon on me. Do I have that right? What sense does that make?”

  “Frankly, I was hopin’ you could tell me,” he said with a sigh. “Of course, that was before this Arthur business. Now it is painfully obvious that you haven’t got any more of a clue as to how that gun got in there than I do.”

  “You thought I did? You thought I lied to you?”

  “Could we defer that fight?’ he asked gently. “We’re gettin’ off track. Not lying. I thought you might have forgotten something, semi-consciously ignored somethin’ injurious to a friend, say.” He shrugged, giving up on that idea, deflecting the squabble I was itching to have.

  “This Arthur’s card,” Mackenzie said. “Doesn’t inspire faith, does it, with no last name, no business, no title, no location. That crown. Like The Prince, you think? Hard to believe he’s for real.”

  “He looked like money. Cashmere and good teeth. The whole package.”

  “Probably has different cards—maybe different phones—for different needs.” He pocketed the card. “Ted Serfi was said to be connected, you know. This Arthur might be part of that.”

  “He didn’t look the type.”

  “What look is that?” The cat had sidled up to the love of his autumnal years and was rubbing against Mackenzie’s slacks. I could hear the purr as I held the refrigerator open and stared at its pitiable contents.

  “You were maybe expecting a Damon Runyon character? Somebody in a striped suit with wide shoulders and, of course, a fedora? A funny-talking guy with his moll dressed in tight satin and a little hat with a veil? Something subtle like that?”

  There is not much that’s sillier than a mushy Southerner imitating a New York accent. Except maybe a Yankee woman who believes you can recognize the mob by their outfits. I hid my embarrassment by looking at the very back of the refrigerator shelves, not that there were any good surprises in the small containers there.

  By the time I turned around, the two Macs, as I now thought of them, were on the leather sofa. Mackenzie was fiddling with the TV remote, and Macavity, who was obviously secure in his neuterhood, was obstructing his love’s vision by lying vertically on the man’s shirt, stretched up toward his face, which he assiduously licked. My roomie had become my cat’s kitten. I didn’t want to think about it.

  “Truce?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Sure.” Dinner was going to be eggs by default, even though they reminded me of the sausage. What was I going to do about that, about anything?

  “Then I’ll entertain you. Ready for the stupid call of the day?”

  I nodded and cracked eggs. There was nothing in the pantry worth putting into an omelette. Who was running this place? As egalitarian as Mackenzie was, he didn’t qualify as a wife, and that’s what we both needed.

  “Woman calls nine-one-one, barely coherent. Turns out a man phoned and told her to cut up all the shoes in her closet as an act of faith because he was the owner of a new shoe store and, as a special promotion, she’d been picked to get fifty free pairs of shoes.” He paused in his narration. “What does any woman need with fifty pairs of shoes?”

  “Shoes are a psychological issue unto themselves. Too much to deal with now,” I said. “Go on.” Not that I had fifty pairs—but it wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard.

  “The guy says he’s coming over in ten minutes to check whether she’d had enough faith and if she had, she gets this certificate for the fifty pairs of shoes.”

  I carried my plate to the table. “Tell me she didn’t.”

  “I cannot tell a lie. She did.”

  The cat decided that both he and the man were now clean enough and was snuggling in to sleep at his side.

  “It must be hard to slice shoes.”

  “Tough as shoe leather, I’ll bet,” he said. “Took sweat and effort, but she had the muscles and the faith. Yet amazingly enough, the so-called shoe-store owner never showed up.”

  The range of human behavior was stupefying. Not only was this woman a complete idiot, but one had to wonder about the caller, who obviously took perverse pleasure from the thought of sliced shoes.

  Maybe his pleasure was based on power and nothing more. With willing a woman to julienne her footwear. Like scaring a woman with an innocuous, if homely, sausage.

  “When the nine-one-one call was answered, she was barefoot. She’d been afraid that if she left her last pair of shoes—the sneakers on her feet—intact, she’d show too little faith. One of those women with a perfectly organized house, nothing out of place. She had the shredded shoes in a trash bag so they wouldn’t make a mess.”

  I finished my eggs and toast, rinsed my dish, and leaving the rest of the clearing up till later, I joined the Macs on the sofa. And I waited.

  Mackenzie seemed blissfully contented with our silence, interrupted only by the buzz saw of the cat’s purr.

  “You know,” I finally said, “that lady cut up her own shoes and called nine-one-one. I was accosted—politely, civilly, within the law, I realize. But all the same, it scared me and I’m not a ninny. I wouldn’t have qualified for stupid call of the day even if I had called the police. Somebody put a gun in my pocketbook. Somebody followed me. I am not comfortable with this.

  “Supposing I don’t get killed and I remain a pre-homicide case. I know that’s not your area of expertise, and I know you’re going to check this Arthur out, but do you have advice as to what I should do meantime?”

  “Let me think on that.” He put his arm around me and the three of us snuggled and purred, until he said, “Okay. I think you should grade those papers you brought home so you’ll have time to start writin’ your article.”

  I sat bolt upright with enough force to make Macavity decide to leave the couch. He understood that there was going to be a homicide after all. I had been worried that I was being set up for the role of victim, but—surprise, surprise—I was going to be the perp.

  Before I could strangle him, Mackenzie added a few thoughts. “Want to know what not to do? Anythin’ that could get you hurt. Which is to say, don’t go to lousy movies all by your lonesome, be aware of your surroundin’s, and come home.”

  “That’s…rather a primitive plan,” I said. His protectiveness struck me as equal parts of loving concern, arrogance, and a desire to keep his life simple. “Sometimes your people skills make it obvious that you’re used to dealing with dead folk.”

  “We don’t know who or what Arthur is yet. Finding out is not your field of work. The thing is, my C doesn’t stand for Carson, either.”

  “Huh? Like Kit Carson? Or, in your case, Carson Kit?”

  “Wrong. Like Carson Drew, Nancy’s father.”

  “I’ve never confused you with my father,” I snapped.

  “But maybe you’ve confused yourself with Mr. Drew’s sp
unky daughter. Don’t. Nancy Drew is fictional. That’s why she always winds up okay. I’ll find out about Arthur, but it’s my strong suspicion I’m not going to find a whole lot because I suspect that he, too, is a fiction.”

  “You’re doubting me again? I saw—”

  “You saw somebody who said that was his name. Somebody who has a phone number which, when answered, will undoubtedly reinforce that impression. None of that necessarily makes it so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Gut feelin’. Plus the lack of any information on the card. Plus his shabby way of approachin’ you, which suggests a man steppin’ out of the shadows, carefully stayin’ within the law and yet deliberately managing to intimidate you. Plus his wanting to see the gun.” He looked at me, his eyes as blue and deep as a loch in the land of his forefathers.

  “I think,” I began, “I think what he wants is…” I could barely bring myself to say it to this man, but there did seem to be a theme that repeated itself, lightly, inconsequentially, but regularly. “…that article,” I finally said.

  “What article?” he asked and to my horror, I realized that he was honestly baffled.

  “The one I’m…not writing,” I whispered. “But they think I am.” It was painful to say that, since I also thought I was writing it. I was simply…blocked. I was so glad that articulate writers had made up a technical term for not doing their work.

  “Like that joke about the charms used to keep elephants out of Philly, and when the response is that I’ve never seen an elephant here, the answer is, ‘See? They work.’”

  “I’ve heard that joke.”

  “But you’re seriously saying that man will go to great lengths to get hold of an article that doesn’t exist? What could worry somebody about that? What do they think you know?”

  I couldn’t guess. I had notes about the history of the parade and its significance as an organizing principle for a sort of village within the city. I had notes on whatever Vincent and his friends had been willing to share, plus descriptions of places they’d shown me, and facts taken from a book about the Mummers, O, Dem Golden Slippers, by Dr. Charles Welch.