by Rita Lakin
Evvie has taped the Sicilianos’ home address next to the snapshot Angelina gave us of her husband up on the dashboard. She says that’s how cops do it. However, Angelina gave us a fifty-year-old wedding photo. I must admit young Elio looks dashing with his black handlebar mustache and full head of hair. I especially like the twinkle in his eye as he gazes down on his pretty new wife. But it isn’t much help to me.
Evvie’s already scoped out where Elio’s car is parked, based on the license plate number Angelina also provided.
With her oven-mitt-covered flashlight in hand, she is attempting to write her latest movie review for the Lanai Gardens’ Free Press to pass the time. I am merely sitting there, simmering, as I hear crackling noises behind me, indicating food being unwrapped and knowing what a mess I’ll find in my car tomorrow.
“How’s this for a title?” she asks me. “‘Good Girl Goes Très Bad. Review of He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.’”
“Pretty good,” I say. Ever since our first case, the Kmart handbag rescue, Evvie has been dragging us to mystery movies only. The girls sit there scared witless, clutching one another, squeezing their eyes shut at the gory bits, yet secretly getting a charge out of all the excitement. Except that Bella now has nightmares and Ida never stops bitching about how much she hates those movies. Nothing deters Evvie. She sees it as necessary research for our new business.
Evvie continues to read her review aloud. “‘Another French movie, and you know how much this reviewer loves French movies…’”
“Yeah,” Ida pipes up from the backseat, “’cause they’re so dirty.”
“It’s you, Ida dear, who has the dirty mind. The French are sophisticated.” She goes back to reading. “Anyway, ‘remember that adorable Audrey Tautou from Amélie? She’s in this movie, too, but watch out, no petits pois this time. Now there’s blood on her chapeau…’”
“Are you sure you want petits pois?” I ask. “I think that means green peas.”
Suddenly there is a commotion in the backseat.
“You block my ten and I’ll smack you,” Ida shouts at Sophie.
Sophie slams down the cards in Bella’s lap, shouting as she does.
“Take that! And that! And that!”
“Oof,” says Bella in reaction to Sophie’s enthusiasm.
“Bitch!” says Ida.
“Nah, nah,” says Sophie.
“I’ll get you for that!” And Ida slams down her cards even harder on poor Bella’s lap, ruining Sophie’s run.
“Oof,” says Bella again, her stomach really taking a beating. “Excuse me,” she announces, “I have to go.”
“I told you not to drink all that seltzer,” Ida says.
“Well, you punching me didn’t help.”
“Can’t you hold it in?” Sophie insists.
“No…”
“Now what do we do?” Ida asks.
Evvie turns to them. “Well, cops usually carry an empty bottle with them.”
“A lot of good that would do us,” Ida comments.
“I have to go. Now!” Bella is wiggling from side to side.
I look up and down the dark street. “Nothing’s open around here except the bar,” I tell her. “You’ll have to go in there.”
“No way,” says Bella, scrunching lower in her seat.
“Take your mind off it,” Sophie offers. “Have a bite of halvah.”
Bella wiggles in the seat.
“I gotta go,” she insists. “But I’m not walking into that place alone.”
“I’ll take her over there,” says Sophie. “But what do I say if somebody asks me what we’re doing around here?”
That stops us for a moment.
“Just act senile,” says Ida. “That’s what they think we are anyway.”
“Good plan,” says Evvie.
Sophie and Bella slowly get out of the car, looking around the empty streets fearfully. There isn’t a soul to be seen anywhere. Evvie whispers out the window, “I’m going to lock the door after you.”
“Just don’t blow our cover,” says Ida.
“I told you we needed a jerk,” Bella whimpers as they head for the bar.
We wait, eyes glued on the bar door, shpilkes.
I turn the radio on to take our minds off what might be going on inside the bar. I get a news station. All ears perk up as we hear: “As reported earlier today, Josephine Dano Martinson, sixty-one, died tragically at the Boca Springs Health Spa where she was a member of long standing. She was found dead of heart failure, lying near her own private steam room.”
We look at one another, surprised.
The announcer continues. “Mrs. Martinson, one of Florida’s twenty-five wealthiest women, died on the day she was to host a fund-raiser for the Boca Raton Opera. She is survived by her second husband, Robert Martinson.”
“Two dead rich women in less than a week,” I say.
“Coincidence?” asks Evvie.
“Probably,” I comment. “Maybe.”
Ida says, “Too bad Sophie is missing this. Here’s another rich widower she won’t be able to get her hands on.”
Suddenly the bar door bursts open and Sophie bolts out, practically dragging Bella with her. They are moving fast. I quickly unlock the car doors. Sophie shoves Bella into the backseat, knocking her on top of Ida, then jumps in after her. “Shut the lights, fast!”
“What?” spits Ida, as she caroms Bella back at Sophie. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. The card game’s over. They’re coming out.”
“Did you get to go?” Evvie asks Bella worriedly.
“Yeah, but I was in such a rush I got my support hose all twisted.”
All our eyes are now facing the bar entrance as a group of tough-looking older guys pile out. They say their macho good-byes, playfully punching one another as they head for their cars.
“Quick,” Ida says, smacking Evvie on the back. “Which one is Siciliano?”
“I can’t tell yet,” she says.
“That’s what I keep telling you, they all look alike in the dark,” Ida says maliciously.
“Don’t look for the guy,” I say. “Just watch his car.”
“That’s so smart,” says Bella admiringly, as she gets her twisted hose straightened out.
Moments later Elio Siciliano climbs into his big black Chrysler. I try to get a good look at him, but all I see is a large, bulky guy with a semibald head of gray hair and bowed legs.
He starts up his motor, and I start mine.
The girls in the back lean over the front seats to stare out the windshield. They are fairly panting with excitement.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
“What?” a chorus of four voices yelps.
“What if he’s a fast driver and I can’t keep up with him?” I’ve been doubting the sanity of this whole endeavor all evening.
“Never mind that,” says Bella. “What if he catches us and has a machine gun?”
Luckily, Mr. Siciliano drives at a moderate speed. Eight blocks later he arrives at a modest light gray stucco cottage. I check the address. It’s his. After he parks in his garage, I head for home. The stakeout is over.
Operation Elio is a bust.
So that’s it. We wasted a whole evening and I have nothing to show for it but a car littered with garbage.
We arrive back at Lanai Gardens around midnight. The girls, still on a high, are already rewriting history, chatting about what they’ll report around the pool tomorrow. Not me. I just want to crawl into bed with a pillow over my head and think about the possibility of moving to Alaska.
10
Attack of the Flying Aunts
I am awakened at four A.M. My pillow is damp; my sheets are in a tangle. I can’t believe it. It’s the Flying Aunts dream again.
Why can’t I have one of those easy ones, like the losing-your-car-keys dream or the forgetting-where-you-live dream?
I hate this one. It’s my mother and her three sisters, harpies, zooming kamikaze-like down at
my poor father, screeching at him while he’s strapped in an electric chair at the kitchen table. Like always, he’s clutching the New York Post in one hand. But in his other hand? I always have to wait and see.
Evvie and I are also in this dream. As usual, I’m a shy eight and she’s an adorable six. Tonight she tosses her curly red hair about and hits me with a giant jar of Gerber’s baby spinach. Believe me, she’s hit me with worse. A seltzer bottle last time. Fakackta dream. Oy. And her singing! Jack and Jill went up the hill and Jack fell down… The Flying Aunts love it. They kvell how she’s better than Judy Garland. And cuter, too. They never kvell over me.
Then, just before the screeching aunts can put the plug in the socket and electrocute Dad, he throws me the thing he clutches in his other hand. It’s always a book. It’s always a different book. Tonight it is an illustrated Cinderella. “Read,” he says. “Read!”
The dream always ends with my mother’s complaint: “He never remembers to take out the garbage.”
I get up, make coffee, and ask myself, so what was that about, my childhood? Why now? Hey, that was sixty-seven years ago and now it’s relevant? Give me a break. I need this like I need another hole in a bagel.
Mom was always talkative. And oh, so busy, and so was Evvie. Two curly redheads in perpetual motion, unlike the plain, straight-brown-haired, quiet, boring ones.
They went to the beauty parlor together and to Klein’s department store on Union Square for every Saturday sale, while Dad’s idea of excitement was to take me to the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union Hall down near the Battery.
All the guys hung out there. I was their mascot. They smoked cigars, chewed gum, and ate pistachios. They shot pool at the moth-eaten table in the back room. They listened to the Yankees games or the fights at Madison Square Garden on the big Philco radio. I thrived on secondhand smoke. I loved that place.
There was a small makeshift library where the guys left books to trade, mostly tattered male-action-adventure paperbacks. But for me, they raided their kids’ bookshelves, handing their gifts to me shyly; their kids never read them anyway. Black Beauty. The Wind in the Willows. The Red Pony. I absorbed them all.
Dad was very careful to put the adult books on the highest shelf, where I couldn’t reach them. The first book he ever bought for me was The Wizard of Oz. I always thought that was fitting. For me that was the beginning of my love of books, the most important thing in my young life.
My aunts picking on my dad, the girls picking on Jack when he came to visit. Is that what brought this dream on?
Cinderella. Me? Maybe Dad was telling me to keep sweeping the ashes until Prince Charming arrives so I can live happily ever after? Well? Yes and no on that one.
Jack and Jill fell down the hill? Jack fell and fell and fell…Yeah, that’s glaringly clear, too. He did fall, my first darling Jack, my husband, didn’t he? Fell because of a bullet.
I sigh. I don’t want to let my thoughts go there. Enough. Time to get up and work at my crossword puzzle until the sun comes up.
11
A Three-Letter Word
Someone else was up early. May Levine, seventy-two, content with living alone on the ground floor of Building J, Phase Five, always boasted that she’d made the right choice. She had easy access in and out of her apartment. No steps to climb. No waiting for the clunky elevator.
But this morning she would regret that choice.
She briskly massaged her face with Pond’s cold cream. Her daughter in New Jersey should only listen to her. Doris, the big-shot tennis player, had skin like a crocodile, while her mother’s face looked twenty years younger than the rest of her body. May’s mother always told her, “May, save your face or your touchas—one or the other always goes.” Easy decision. Nobody had seen her tush in years.
Time to get dressed. She dropped her nightie and her old lime green chenille bathrobe onto the bed. She’d had it for forty years and it was still in good condition. You didn’t grow up in New York on Delancey Street without learning how to save money. She stood for a moment looking at her naked body in the closet-door mirror. What a mess! Varicose veins everywhere, sagging stomach and tush, boobies that hung straight down. From osteoporosis, she’d lost about two inches in height already. Life wasn’t fair. She’d been a beauty when she was young. Why did we have to get so ugly when we got old? She sighed. She whirled about, round and round, remembering the pretty young May she used to be.
Suddenly she froze. She thought she’d heard a noise. And then she saw something behind her reflected in the mirror. There was a man looking in her window! He had a mask on. Oh, God, she was going to be killed! Then she realized that his hand was pumping up and down along something pale and flabby.
May screamed. “Peeping Tom! Peeping Tom!”
It’s noon and Evvie, who is always prompt, waits for me downstairs next to my car. I approach her with a nearly bursting bag of books. She, too, has a full bag. “What took you so long? I’m melting from the heat.”
“Sorry,” I say as I open my trunk and pile all of our accumulated reading materials inside.
A familiar gravelly voice calls out, “Yoo-hoo.”
We turn to see Sol Spankowitz, from Phase Three, and his best and only friend, Irving Weiss, standing in the shade outside Irving’s apartment, three doors down from where my car is parked.
Near them is Irving’s wife, Millie, now in her third year of Alzheimer’s, propped up in her wheelchair. Yolie—really Yolanda—the adorable young woman who is caring for Millie, croons Spanish lullabies softly in her ear, hoping to reach her somehow. Millie is going through a bad patch these days.
Sol wiggles his fingers playfully at Evvie. Evvie, who can’t stand him, doesn’t wiggle back.
Irving is small and thin, sweet and gentle. Sol is bulky and coarse and as sensitive as a slab of meat from his old butcher shop. The guys have been pals since they moved down here twenty years ago. Sol’s wife, Clara, died three years ago.
The guys have the horse racing form open while they plot their daily bets.
We walk over to greet Millie, who no longer recognizes us. It breaks our hearts to see what has happened to our dear friend.
Sol winks. “Hello, you dreamboat,” he says to Evvie, trying to sound suave. He flirts, but he does it poorly.
“Yeah, right, and why are you wearing two different color socks?” says Evvie, who can always find new ways to put him down.
Sol changes the subject quickly. “So, what’re the five luscious lady P.I.’s up to these days?”
“None of your business,” Evvie says unkindly.
“How is she doing?” I ask Irving. I always ask and always get the same answer.
“OK,” he says. Irving is a man of very few words. And we know Millie is not OK; she never will be again. We know how much it takes out of him, always worrying about her, but he will never complain. Bless his heart.
We each give Millie a kiss, say buenos días to Yolie, and go back to the car.
Evvie punches my arm, laughing. “Don’t you love the way Sol dresses?”
“Uh-huh, the pink flamingo shirt really works well with the blue shorts with little crawling alligators.”
“And the mismatched socks look divine with the black wing-tip shoes.” Then Evvie relents. “I do feel sorry for him. He seems so lonely under all that bad taste.”
Now the girls arrive with their books and dump them into my trunk, as well. We have to wait a few moments for Sophie to finish the last few pages of one of her novels. Then, done, she sighs, closes the book, and tosses it in the trunk with the others. “That was so satisfying,” she says.
Bella looks at her, puzzled. “Since when do you read the last page? You always read that first. So you know how it’s going to end.”
Ida sneers at her. “I never heard of anyone who reads the last page of a book first. Only you.”
“What’s so hard to understand? What if I die before the book ends? Then I’ll never know what happened.”
> Ida throws up her hands, showing her disgust. “I give up. You’re hopeless.”
The books delivered, they take off for their mah-jongg game. Evvie leaves, as well, to polish her movie review. None of them ever wants to go to the library with me. And that’s just fine. I enjoy this time on my own.
I am about to get into the car when Hy Binder sidles up and pokes his face next to mine.
“Hey, didja hear this one?” He never pauses to take a breath, so there’s no stopping him. “How can a guy tell if his wife is dead?”
“I really don’t need to know, Hy,” I say.
“The sex is the same but the dishes pile up!” He guffaws.
Lola, standing off to one side, carrying her dry cleaning, calls out to him. “Tell her already.”
“Yeah, didja hear? Peeping Tom in Phase Five!”
At the expression of surprise on my face, Hy grins. “Gotcha!”
My book bags are dragging my shoulders down as I lug them to the entrance of the Lauderdale Lakes library, one of my favorite places. It is a small brick building in a residential section. This branch is very bright and inviting. It is my weekly job to return all our finished books and to choose new ones.
In the good old days, three months ago, pre-P.I. biz, I was the only mystery reader. The girls adored romance novels, modern novels, and anything about Hollywood stars. But now it’s only mysteries, except for Ida, of course, who always has to be different. The girls feel these are their textbooks on crime. Besides, they like being scared.
Roly-poly Conchetta Aguilar became my good friend years ago, after discovering that I had been a librarian, too. Her assistant, young Barney Schwartz, loves to hear the gossip and stories I tell about those wacky characters I live with. His favorite was always crazy Greta Kronk, who raided our Dumpsters at night and wrote odd poems and made sketches of everyone. Poor Greta, who no longer is with us.
The library is quiet right now, and we sit at one of the tables peacefully enjoying Conchetta’s wonderful strong Cuban coffee as we gossip. “So, what’s the latest word?” Barney asks, eager to relish a new story.
“You want a word? I’ll give you a word. How about—sex!”