Adjusted to Death

by Jaqueline Girdner

  “Set up that meeting and I’ll ask some questions,” was what I did say. And, “I’ll talk to Eileen and Renee. They must know something.”

  - Four-

  Driving home, I berated myself for promising Maggie my help. It was too damn dangerous. I didn’t even know Scott Younger. What did I care who killed him? But even as that thought came, I knew I did care. I remembered his dead body once more and shivered. No one should die like that.

  As I waited impatiently at a stop sign, I considered the dexterity with which Maggie had manipulated my spine in the past. Had she just as skillfully been manipulating my mind with her sobs? Her childlike expectations invited fulfillment. She was a person others would always rally around to protect.

  I told myself that I would leave this one to the police. Let them interview the suspects. Let them consider the evidence. Let them find the killer. There was probably evidence galore. Like… like my fingerprints on the murder weapon. Sweat turned my hands slippery on the steering wheel.

  I worked all of that evening and deep into the night on the incredible bulk of paperwork generated by Jest Gifts. It went slowly. I was unable to focus. My mind was full of speculation and indecision. My body was full of dread and sadness.

  Finally exhausted, I locked the cat-door, pulled on my red-and-white-striped dropseat pajamas and lay down on my half of the king-size mattress, promising myself I would sleep in. I even broke my own rules and allowed C.C. to climb up onto the other half of the bed. After two hours of restless imaginings, I fell asleep, lulled by NatuRest, the “natural” sleeping pill, and C.C.’s purrs, which couldn’t quite mask the sound of her claws shredding the comforter.

  A ringing in my ears and a blow to my chest awakened me. I knew that I wasn’t boxing when I heard the second ring. C.C. had just used my chest as a diving board on her way to the telephone. At the third ring I opened my eyes to the sunlight streaming down from the two skylights above my bed, and realized that I had forgotten to turn on the answering machine the night before. Cursing, I dragged myself up and lurched down the darkened hallway to the phone.

  “It’s Craig,” said the telephone in my estranged husband’s voice. I groaned and absently combed my hair with my fingers. Then I remembered that he couldn’t see me over the telephone.

  “Is it in the papers already?” I asked irritably.

  “Is what in the papers?”

  “Listen, I’ll investigate if I want to! And, no, you can’t move back in again,” I asserted.

  “Investigate what? Are you okay?” I could almost see his confused brown eyes.

  I took a deep breath, sat down in the comfy chair and felt the shock of cold naugahyde through the open dropseat of my pajamas. It was time to begin the conversation over again.

  “I just woke up. What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s eleven thirty. What’s going on, Kate?”

  “I’m a little tired. I stayed up late last night doing paperwork. What did you call about?”

  “I need to talk to you, face to face. I thought I could take you to dinner Friday night.”

  “I guess so,” I said slowly. I was still sleepy. “You know we can’t live together, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I need to talk to you,” he said. I felt tears prickling my eyelids and self-disgust simultaneously prickling my awakening mind. The idiocy of my heart. He finally agreed with me, and I wanted to weep.

  He told me he’d pick me up at seven. I hung up and nestled in my chair, ready to have that good cry I had been promising myself. The setting was right. The lights were off and the curtains closed in my cluttered home office. Desks, file cabinets and stacks of paperwork loomed ghoulishly in the dark. I looked for the cat to cuddle. But C.C. was nowhere to be found when I needed her. Maybe she was out finding another snake to bring me. Or was that just last week’s sport? The doorbell rang, jarring me back to the reality of late Thursday morning.

  When I pulled the front door open the glowing colors of daylight temporarily blinded me. But as my eyes adjusted I could see my friend, Ann Rivera, standing on my doorstep. Her grey-wool pinstripe suit and pink silk blouse dressed her tall elegant body for success, but her kind brown face was stretched into a goofy grin. She pointed at me and laughed loudly.

  “God, those pajamas, feet in them and everything! And your hair. It looks just like Woodstock’s, you know, the bird in Peanuts.” I knew exactly what it looked like. When I slept with a pillow over my head, it flattened my hair from the sides into a lumpy Mohawk strip in the center.

  “I’ll have you know I’ve worked very hard at this effect,” I told her, patting the lumps. “Why are you here in the middle of the day?”

  “I’m here to tell you about Scott Younger, and to take you to lunch,” she said. She quickly crossed over the threshold into the house and hugged me.

  “Scott Younger?” I said, pulling back, suddenly fully awake. “What do you know about Scott Younger?”

  “I knew him at Crocker University, almost twenty years ago.”

  “But why are you here? Do you know he’s dead?”

  “Of course,” she said. She grabbed my shoulder and turned me in the direction of the hall. “Get dressed. I need to be back at the hospital by one thirty.”

  “I’ve got to take a shower first.”

  “Well, take it quickly. I’ll talk to you while you do.”

  She followed me back down the hall, laughing even more loudly than before once she caught sight of the portion of my backside so inelegantly revealed by my dropseat. Then she gracefully perched on the toilet seat while I showered, yelling over the roar of the water.

  As I soaped my hair and body, I heard that Eileen had called her the night before and told her about Scott Younger’s murder. Eileen had been surprised to learn that Ann had known Younger years before, and had asked her to talk to Maggie. Maggie in turn had referred Ann to me as “the detective,” instructing her to tell me everything she knew about Scott. Maggie had not realized that Ann and I were already acquainted.

  “Where do you know Eileen from?” I shouted, rinsing in the warm water.

  “ACA meetings. Eileen said it was okay to tell you.”

  “What’s ACA?”

  “Adult Children of Alcoholics. They’re like Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but for people who grew up with alcoholic parents.”

  “Why do you go?”

  “ACA’s have similar sets of problems,” she hollered, articulate even at that volume. “A sense of worthlessness, confusion, despair, and anger. And a tendency to take care of everyone but ourselves. We share and learn.”

  I got out of the shower and dried off while Ann spoke in softer tones about her ACA experiences. I was putting on my corduroys and sweater when the phone rang.

  “I’ve got it all set up for tomorrow,” said Maggie eagerly. “You can talk to Eileen and Renee in the morning. And all of the suspects have agreed to an afternoon meeting.”

  I didn’t even ask her how she had managed this. I had experienced her manipulation first-hand.

  “Has Ann Rivera called you yet?” she asked.

  “She’s here now,” I said, nodding at Ann coming down the hall.

  “Oh neat! And Wayne wants to visit you tonight. I told him to call you.”

  “Maggie, he might be a murderer!”

  “Oh, he couldn’t be,” she blithely assured me. “And he knows I know he’s visiting you, so you’re safe in any case. I told him you might want to look over some of his short stories.”

  “You told him what?” I squawked. Ann’s eyebrows went up inquiringly.

  “Wow, Kate. Don’t get upset. He’s a writer. I told him you’d be interested. It gives you an excuse to talk to him.”

  “Great. And who is going to be running Jest Gifts while I’m reading Wayne’s stories, and interviewing everyone else?”

  “Jeez, be glad you have a business to run,” Maggie said. I shriveled with guilt, just as she had probably intended.

 
“All right, I’ll talk to him. But please don’t set anything else up for me without asking.” I needed to curb Maggie’s enthusiasm, and soon.

  Ann teased me about my capitulation as we drove to Miranda’s Restaurant in downtown Mill Valley.

  “You ought to come to an ACA meeting. You’re obviously a born caretaker,” she said. I ignored her.

  “Tell me everything you know about Scott Younger,” I ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She aimed a crisp salute in my direction. “It’s strange to think he’s dead after all these years. I met Scott in 1970 at Crocker University. You know Crocker, don’t you?”

  I nodded. Crocker is one of those small private universities where parents with money send their kids, if the kids don’t have the grades for the most prestigious schools like Stanford and Berkeley. Its campus is an architectural jewel set in the rolling hills of Sonoma County, just over the county line from Marin. Plenty of Marin movers and shakers got their degrees from Crocker University.

  “Scott was in one of my classes. He was tall and gorgeous, a P.E. major, but not a jock.” I glanced over when I heard her voice soften, and saw that her eyes had gone out of focus and into memory. “He had long black hair tied back in a leather thong in those days. And he wore handmade embroidered linen shirts with gathered sleeves and open necks. Robin Hood in a Volkswagen van. Only he didn’t steal from the rich. They paid him for drugs.

  “His father was a judge in Monterey. I met him once, a pleasant man. His mother was dead. I think she died giving birth to Scott.

  “All the women at school wanted him, including me. I was up for anything exciting and new then. New roles, new ideas, new politics, new experiences.” She looked my way as if for approval. I nodded my understanding.

  “I knew him for a year before he asked me out. What I didn’t know was that he had spent that year building up a very profitable drug business. He was not your average student, selling a little to support his own habit. He was a real dealer.”

  “What did he sell?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Marijuana, LSD, mescaline, the hallucinogens, mostly. Some speed too, I think. Student stuff.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “My sister’s boyfriend told me, after I was already involved with Scott. But I had wondered. He wasn’t living in a dormitory, or in his hippie van. He was living on an estate, his estate—five acres in the hills. A two-story house complete with a maid and two bodyguards. And the loudest stereo system I’d ever heard.”

  “Bodyguards?”

  “I didn’t know they were bodyguards at first. I thought they were his friends. But they wouldn’t talk to me. Two silent, nasty-looking, big men.” She shivered, but then smiled, her face soft once more.

  “My first night with Scott was like a magic carpet ride. Those men chauffeured us everywhere. Scott and I lay in the back of his van on a mattress-sized velvet cushion, listening to the Moody Blues and smoking dope. It was laced with a little something extra, I think. When the van stopped, he lifted me out into a formal rose garden. I’ve never found out where that rose garden was. We sat there on a stone bench, surrounded by the fragrance of flowers and looked up at the stars. Then they drove us back to his house to make love.”

  I pulled into Miranda’s parking lot. I didn’t get out of the car.

  “And…” I prompted, lost in her story.

  Her eyes refocused. “And, a lot more. Let’s go in and I’ll tell you over lunch.” She was back to the present, a brisk mental-hospital administrator on her lunch break.

  Miranda’s Restaurant precariously combined nouvelle cuisine and health food. Too often, this meant a minuscule scoop of brown rice surrounded by a handful of artfully arranged vegetable bits. The decor was tasteful, however. Pastel colors, original art, fresh flowers and classical music. We were seated in a mauve booth by an ethereal-looking waitress dressed in Chinese silk pajamas. A bowl of iceland poppies and fairy primroses sat on our table.

  Ann ordered the plum soup and Greek salad from the “creative menu.” I asked for the Indonesian tofu and vegetables. And we both requested hot herbal tea to ward off the November cold. When the waitress left I turned back to Ann.

  “You were making love to Scott,” I reminded her.

  “Ah, yes.” She smiled. “The man was strange, in and out of bed.”

  “Just for starters, tell me how he was strange in bed.”

  “This is kind of embarrassing,” she said, looking at me intently across the table. “Remember, times were different then. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “Yes.” I sighed nostalgically. “And now it’s fantasy, mineral water and New Age music. Go on with the story. Your coitus interruptus is killing me.”

  She laughed, and then stopped abruptly. “I can’t believe he was murdered. How awful.”

  I nodded. Of course it was awful. Flippancy was my antidote to the awfulness of finding his body, a memory that rode on my shoulders constantly now, like an uninvited hitchhiker. I wiggled my shoulders impatiently, shaking it off. Ann began to speak again, her face now serious.

  “First off, while we made love, his bodyguards stood right outside the door, which was actually left open.”

  “How bizarre. Did they listen?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. At least they pretended to be totally disinterested. And considering the number of women Scott was probably seeing, maybe they really were. Scott was quite a Lothario. And talked as if he wanted to get someone pregnant. I heard he did once, after my time. But apparently the woman ran away and got an abortion.”

  Our waitress floated to our table and served us tea. I sipped mine absently, hoping the tea would soothe the queasiness I felt. For all of my flippancy, something about discussing the sex life of a man I had last seen brutally dead was not sitting well on my empty stomach. But I didn’t change the subject.

  “And that wasn’t the strangest thing,” Ann said.

  “What was?”

  She bent toward me and whispered. “He cried when he made love. Sobbed like a baby. It was so spooky. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  The waitress brought us our food. Ann’s plum soup was an unappetizing shade of purple, but her salad glistened attractively with olive oil and feta cheese. On my plate thin slices of red, green, and yellow peppers were spread out like chrysanthemum petals from a doughnut-shaped mound of brown rice, tofu and broccoli. In the doughnut’s center was a small dish of dipping sauce. I dipped and tasted. The sauce was spicy peanut butter.

  “Why did he cry? Did he ever say?” I needed to know.

  “Never. And I never asked. I wasn’t very experienced at the time, and I thought maybe crying during lovemaking was normal for men.” She slurped a spoonful of purple soup. I tried to imagine her eighteen years ago, without her grey suit or the self-assurance that went with it.

  “Scott rarely spoke at all,” she said. “And stranger than that, I didn’t notice the absence of dialogue for months. He had this presence. He gave an impression of intelligence, of being involved in a conversation without actually opening his mouth.

  “He just watched and listened, like an observer from another galaxy. God, he was cold. I think that’s why I finally broke it off. He was a good lover in spite of the kinks. A gifted photographer, too. And a shrewd businessman. But after a while I realized that I never knew who he really was.”

  “Maybe that was just as well,” I said.

  Ann looked thoughtful for a moment and then nodded. Raising her teacup in a toast, she proclaimed: “To our health and unending naiveté.”

  When I returned home, there were two messages on my answering machine. One was from my warehousewoman Judy.

  The other was from Wayne Caruso, requesting an evening interview. As I listened to his gentle husky voice I wondered if he had ever listened to Scott Younger making love. But I doubted that I’d ever ask him.

  - Five -

  I called Judy back at the warehouse. First off, she wanted to remin
d me that Friday was payday. I couldn’t fault her priorities. And second, the salesman from Softisculp had been around. He wanted to know if I liked the models and how soon he could expect my order.

  My brain churned. Who the hell was Softisculp? Guiltily, I remembered; they were rubber-toy manufacturers. Softisculp had been kind enough to make some prototypes of my latest design ideas. I had brought those models home and put them… Where had I put them? I assured Judy I wouldn’t forget payday, and began a search for the models.

  My search was ended on the top of Hayburners, one of the pinball machines that had survived our short-lived home-amusements business. Living under a pile of old magazines and newspapers were: Advo-cat, a lawyerly feline complete with briefcase and red tie; Accountant, a calculating-insect holding an adding machine in one feeler, and various other creatures come to rubbery life from my pun-ish imagination. I cleared them off of the unused machine and considered my next move.

  I had a truckload of paperwork to cope with. I had to make a decision about Softisculp. I needed to call Wayne Caruso back. And I could have used a nap. But, most of all, I wanted to escape all thoughts of Scott Younger’s death. My hands decided to play pinball.

  I reached under Hayburners and flipped a switch. The machine was bathed in a pink glow. A push of the red reset button brought the joyous kerchunk of the backboard metal racehorses assuming their starting positions. I shot the first ball and worked the flipper buttons on the sides of the machine. The ball rolled toward my right flipper. Slapping its button, I propelled it toward the back targets on the playfield. It rolled lazily up to the top of the machine and down a side lane, rewarding me with the sound of a bell and fifty points, and then came rolling back toward the center drain.

  Another bell rang as my ball went down the drain. It was the doorbell.

  Sergeant Feiffer of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department was on my doorstep. So was C.C.. She shot through the open door like a cat out of hell. Much more fun than entering through her laboriously installed fifty-nine-dollar cat-door. Feiffer was slightly more polite, and much more attractive. He stood there, six feet of masculinity under curly blond hair, and twinkled his clear blue eyes at me.