Mother Finds a Body

by Gypsy Rose Lee

  “Come in,” Mother sang out.

  The sheriff crooked a finger in my direction and stood aside so I could enter.

  I don’t know what I expected to see when I walked into the doctor’s office. I’m sure I didn’t expect the scene that greeted me. The books on shelves from the floor to the high ceiling, the dark, real leather chairs, the graceful draperies, the subdued light filtering through the Venetian blinds, and Mother, my poor little mother who mustn’t be upset, sitting with an afghan robe around her feet, at a card table.

  The doctor and several men I had never seen before sat opposite her. The doctor shuffled the cards. His dark hands moved quickly and expertly as the cards fell into place. He wore a black alpaca coat with a white shirt showing at the neck. The whiteness accentuated his swarthiness. When he smiled at Mother his teeth gleamed; he didn’t smile at Biff or me, he greeted us professionally.

  “Bedside manner,” Biff whispered to me, “Ysleta style.”

  Mother smiled wanly at me from over a pile of poker chips. “Louise dear,” she said. She held out her arms, and I walked over to her.

  “Are you feeling alright mother?’

  ‘Oh yes. These men have been so kind.”

  That was an understatement if I ever heard one. They weren’t only kind, they were groveling.

  “They’ve been teaching me how to play poker,” Mother said innocently. “My, it is a complicated game. I told them I would rather play pachisi, but they told me if I was going to stay in Texas for any time at all I had to learn poker.” Mother laughed gaily and went on, “I’m such a dummy, though. I guess I never will learn.”

  Her slender hand touched the pile of chips lovingly.

  Biff and I gulped. Mother was the champion poker player of the troupe.

  “And Biff,” Mother said maternally, “my son.” She held out a hand for him, too.

  The sheriff pushed Biff toward her.

  “Go to her,” he whispered.

  The note of reverence was almost too thick now. I couldn’t blame Biff for thinking twice before he threw his arms around Mother’s shoulders. The “my son” sounded mighty funny from where I stood. But not to the men who were listening. They glanced at each other with an “I’d-die-for-her” expression on their faces. They dropped their eyes and clenched their teeth when Mother said: “Thank heavens, my children are with me again.” A big round tear fell down Mother’s cheek, and she looked up at the sheriff without brushing it away.

  “Is it—all over now?” she asked falteringly.

  “You bet it is,” the sheriff said.

  “And can I go home?” Mother’s face was radiant. She let her eyes rest on one man after the other until they had all seen the love light in them. Then she held out her hand to the sheriff.

  “My friend,” she said.

  I had been looking at the same act all my life, but it was still good. Mother was a born actress, I thought. Then I wondered, wondered if it was all an act. If so, Mother had improved.

  “I took the liberty of having one of my boys bring your own car around,” the sheriff said. “The truck, I mean. I thought you folks might want to be alone for a little while.”

  Biff said, “That’s mighty fine of you, Hank.” Then he helped Mother to her feet.

  The men jumped up and began digging in their pockets. They counted out bills and change while one of them counted Mother’s chips. When they handed the money to Mother, she looked at them with wide eyes.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  “Why, that’s your winnings,” one of the men said.

  “You mean, we were playing for keeps?”

  The men laughed sheepishly. I swallowed my gum.

  “Who were those men?” I asked when we were seated in the truck. Mother was too busy counting her winnings to answer me immediately. She looked up for a second. Her forehead was creased from thinking so deeply, and she began counting on her fingers again.

  “I think one of those men cheated me,” she said.

  “Who were they?” I asked, trying to keep my temper under control.

  “Oh, they were just newspapermen,” Mother said. “They wanted an inside story about the murders.”

  “You, uh, gave it to them?” Biff asked. He stared straight ahead as he spoke.

  “Why, of course I did. I told them you were a big lumberman from Oregon. I didn’t think it would sound good if they found out you were a burlesque comic. I told them everything. They wanted pictures, and the only one I had was that baby picture of you, Louise, so I gave it to one of the men. Let’s see now, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . . Yes, I really do think they cheated me.”

  “A lumberman,” Biff said incredulously. “From Oregon, yet.”

  “Is that the picture of me lying on my stomach on the white rug?” I asked.

  “Now you made me lose count,” Mother said pettishly. “I have to start all over again.”

  Mother counted and counted. The motor knocked. The radiator boiled. The windshield clacked.

  “Lumberman,” Biff repeated over and over. “Lumberman.” He was still mumbling when we drove into camp.

  Gee Gee had let out a yelp as the truck stopped, actors and animals piled out of the trailer like an old two-reel comedy.

  “My goodness,” Mother exclaimed. “You’d think I’d been to Europe or Siam or something.”

  “Evangie’s back!” Dimples shouted.

  Trailerites began gathering around the lean-to tent to add their congratulations. The attention put Mother in a special sort of heaven. She hugged and kissed Mamie and even blew a kiss to Corny. The dogs were whining and jumping up and down. Rufus Veronica, the monkey, squealed to be petted, and the guinea pig looked on with his little beadlike eyes glittering.

  Mamie had just set her hair. It was plastered down flat against her small head, and she wore a pale-lavender rayon mesh cap to hold it. Between that and her old gingham dress flapping around her thin hips, she looked more and more like a real native of Oologah, or whatever the name of that place was. I was afraid she was going to cry, and I was right.

  “Oh, I thought they’d never let you out,” she sobbed, clinging to Mother’s neck. She stood back and looked at Mother. Then she threw herself in a camp chair and cried even louder. “It would have been all my fault, too,” she said between bellows. “I always bring nothing but bad luck to people and here I am doing it again . . .”

  It was spoiling Mother’s homecoming. Not because Mother doesn’t like to see people enjoy a good cry, as she puts it, but because Mamie and her hysterics were taking the center of the stage. I knew that by the time I had counted a slow ten, Mother would have a fainting spell or she would feel an asthma attack coming on.

  It was an asthma attack, and she had it before I counted past six.

  “Will you get my Life Everlasting please?” she asked Biff.

  Mamie jumped up and wiped away a tear. “Let me get it. You just sit there and rest now.”

  In a minute she was back with the powder and had sprinkled some in a saucer. She touched a match to the mound and helped Mother cover her head with the Turkish towel. While Mother inhaled and wheezed, Mamie clucked in sympathy.

  Mandy emerged from the trailer wearing his bathrobe and carrying a half-empty bottle of rye. His eyes looked sleepy and his hair was mussed. One side of his face was creased from lying on it.

  “Why doesn’t someone let me in on the news?” he said. He patted Mother’s head gently. “Welcome home, baby,” he said softly. Then to Biff, “How’s it?”

  Biff eyed the bottle. “Tough, Mandy boy, very tough. What I need is a little drink.”

  “Me, too,” Mandy said as though it were a brand-new idea. Corny got the glasses.

  “. . . now all we’ve got to do is find out where she gets the dope,” Biff finished his story and the bottle at the same time.

  For privacy we had gathered at the office. The sheriff had told Biff to keep the inside story of the confession from Mother,
and that meant keeping it from Mamie, too. Biff didn’t think that Mamie would deliberately tell Mother anything that wasn’t good for her to know, but she was too emotional to trust, especially where Mother was concerned.

  Dimples drained the last drop from her glass and eyed the empty bottle morosely. “Well, I guess it’s up to me to fill it,” she said tonelessly. “I’ll go if somebody’ll drive me.”

  “No,” Corny said. “I’ll go. You stay here.”

  He took the five-dollar bill from Dimples and left.

  “He must be damned thirsty,” Dimples remarked as the door slammed.

  “Or curious,” Biff added under his breath.

  Gee Gee looked sharply at Biff as he spoke. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “It’s none of my business, I guess,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I trust that guy. From what you say about Evangie being on that stuff since San Diego . . .”

  “I didn’t say San Diego exactly,” Biff said quickly. “I only said that she started acting funny about that time.”

  “Well, it’s the same thing, ain’t it?” Gee Gee said petulantly. “Always shooting off your big mouth. You never give anybody else a chance to talk. What I wanted to say was this: if Evangie started acting funny since San Diego, then she couldn’t be getting the stuff from here. She either has it with her or—well, some one of us is giving it to her.”

  Biff searched her face for a moment.

  Gee Gee’s eyes met him and she said, “Look, just because I mentioned it don’t go getting ideas that it’s me.”

  “I wasn’t,” Biff said quietly. “I was thinking about something else.”

  He jumped up and started for the door. “Come on, Gyp,” he said from over his shoulder, “I want to examine that pantry again.”

  I thought he had gone a little insane but I followed him. I was getting used to insanity by then. But I did venture a question.

  “And what pantry are you referring to?”

  “That pantry that had its door open the night you thought someone was in the trailer,” Biff said in the same well-spaced, precise tone.

  “Oh that pantry! The only pantry we ever had . . .”

  Then I realized that he was being serious.

  “Do you think the dope is in there? Do you think it was the murderer who was in the trailer with me? Oh, Biff, wait a minute. Don’t leave me alone. Oh. I’m . . .”

  Biff grabbed my arm and dragged me along. He was taking such big steps. I couldn’t keep up with him. Suddenly he slowed down. As we approached the trailer he whistled a little tune. I recognized it as Mother’s four-leaf-clover song:

  “I know a place where the sun never shines . . .”

  “No sense in getting them excited,” he said between notes. “After all, the stuff can’t walk away.”

  He was right about that, of course, but he forgot that it could be carried away.

  19MOTHER AND MAMIE HAD LEFT THE TRAILER. The burned-out powder was in the saucer and the towel was folded neatly beside it. A note written on brown wrapping paper was propped against the lamp: Have gone calling. Love, Mother.

  “Probably telling the folks about me being a lumberman,” Biff said. He rolled up the paper and carelessly shoved it into his pocket.

  The screen door was closed but unfastened. Biff let the dogs out. Then he hooked the monkey to a chain on the hitch and entered the trailer. I followed him. The sun was sinking and it left shadows on the enamel top of the stove. There was a whiskey glass upturned near the coffeepot. A drop of liquor spilled over the shiny surface.

  Biff wiped it up with his finger and smelled it.

  “Looks like Mamie had herself a nip before they went calling,” he said.

  He opened the pantry door and looked inside. Everything was arranged neatly. The salt and pepper and things we used frequently were toward the right. In the back were the bulky supplies like flour and coffee.

  Biff began piling the groceries on the stove. When the pantry was empty he lifted up the shelf paper and looked under that. Then he examined each package and jar before he put it back where it belonged. He emptied the coffee tin into a piece of paper. He went through everything just as carefully. A half loaf of bread caught his attention. He took a knife and removed the soft inside part, then he broke it up into small crumbs.

  “They must have been frightened into hiding the stuff some other place,” I said as Biff closed the pantry door.

  “It certainly wasn’t in any of those boxes or anything. Or it was such a little bit that it couldn’t count.”

  “It only takes a little bit,” Biff replied. He gave the guinea pig the bread crumbs, the crust he wrapped in paper and threw into the wastebasket.

  “In case anybody asks us who ate the bread, all we say is ‘mice.’”

  “You say it to everybody but me!” Gee Gee stood on the steps, looking in at us. Behind her stood Mandy and Dimples. Mandy’s mouth was wide open.

  “Am I screwy or am I?” he asked. “Corpses I can understand, but what the hell you expect to find in the groceries is beyond me.”

  Biff sat down on the foot of the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. He paid no attention to the trio as they came into the trailer.

  “It’s got to be around here someplace,” he said almost to himself. “Stands to reason they got it stashed where they can get it quickly. It costs too much dough to take a chance on hiding it out-of-doors.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Gee Gee asked suddenly. “Let’s tear the joint apart until we find it—”

  She pulled off her beret and rolled up her sleeves. “I’ll tackle the front room with Gyp. You three handle the bedroom.”

  Opening the closet door, she began dragging out the clothes. She threw them on the daybed carelessly.

  “You examine ’em,” she said to me, “and I’ll get ’em out. Squeeze all around the hems and seams carefully. Pockets too. I read in the paper once where they smuggled dope across the border in heels of shoes even. Some dame had diamonds in the cavities of her teeth. They can’t fool me, though. If it’s here, I’m the little girl who’ll find it.”

  We found everything but heroin or cocaine. We found sand from Santa Monica, stubs from the drive-in theater, crumbs from the nutburger, one false fingernail, sixteen cents in pennies, a dried-up martini olive, and $4,397 rolled up in a page of the Racing Form and tucked into a knothole in the back of the bedroom closet.

  Mandy found the money. It was in small dirty balls. His hand shook as he counted it the second time. “Jeesuss, I never saw so much dough in one lump in me life,” he said.

  Dimples threw open the closet door and crowded her bulk inside the stuffy two-by-four room. She ran her hands down the sides of the walls and tapped with her knuckles on the ceiling.

  “Maybe there’s more,” she said breathlessly.

  Biff shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly, “and I don’t think we’ll find the stuff now, either.”

  He began tidying up the trailer, replacing the bureau drawers and hanging up the clothes. Mandy tried to help but he was too dazed. One hand was useless anyway, the money was gripped too tightly in it.

  “Jeesuss, I could buy me a chicken farm or a selling plater,” he mumbled.

  “Yeah, you could,” Biff said, “only you ain’t. The dough goes to the cops and it goes to ’em tonight. We’ve had trouble enough without sticking out our chins for a lousy four thousand bucks.”

  “Four thousand, three hundred and ninety-seven, and if it’s lousy, I’ll still sit still for it,” Gee Gee said grimly.

  “It wouldn’t be yours by any chance?” Dimples asked suddenly. Her eyes were unfriendly, and a hard line made her mouth. “You sure remember the amount close enough.”

  “If you didn’t remember it so close yourself,” Gee Gee snapped, “how do you know I did? If it was mine, I’d admit it, angel pants. For that kind of dough I’d take my chances.”

  “Chances on what?” Biff asked.

  “Don’t give m
e that,” Gee Gee replied quickly. “You know damn well that dough came from the sale of the dope. Think you’re playing with kids?”

  Mandy handed the money to Biff reluctantly, as though he wanted just one more feel to convince himself that it was real.

  Biff folded it carefully and shoved it in his back pocket. He put the spread back on the bed and punched up the cretonne pillows. Then he looked around the trailer to see if everything looked as usual.

  “Not a word about this to Evangie,” he said, patting his back pocket. “We’ll go into the village for dinner, and I’ll scoot over and see the sheriff while you’re all eating. If it belong to any of you,” he said, letting his eyes travel slowly from Gee Gee to Dimples and finally to Mandy, “you’d better tell me now.”

  “What about Gyp?” Mandy said, not maliciously, but as though it was as improbable for me to have that much money as it was for any of them.

  “She’s never had more than a quarter at one time in her life,” Biff said. “Evangie sees to that.”

  Gee Gee lifted that glass from the lamp and touched a match to the wick. A yellow light flickered and brightened as she replaced the bulb.

  “What’s with the electricity?” Dimples asked. She turned up the light switch. There was a dull click but no light.

  “It’s the cord again,” Gee Gee replied. “This time it looks like Rufus has been chewing on it or something. I saw it this afternoon and then when Evangie got home I was too excited to remember it.”

  I hadn’t realized how late it was until darkness fell. Mother had never visited that long before. I was suddenly frightened. I felt as though I had been running. My breath was short.

  “Why doesn’t Mother come home?”

  “She’s probably around camp someplace,” Biff said casually. “I’ll go give a look.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Mandy said quickly. “With that dough, you ain’t walking in the moonlight alone, brother. Not that I don’t trust you or anything, but you never can tell what’ll happen.”

  “How right you are,” Biff said as they left. Gee Gee jumped up and locked the door behind them. She stood with her back braced against the wood-veneer paneling and looked down at her hands. They were trembling.