With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  The afternoon passed almost gracefully. The newspaper meeting was actually fun, as the reporters behaved like Clark Kent hot for the Cavanaugh Hotel fire scoop. I told them about The Scene and also was coerced into finding out whether, by chance, the Bellevue had an available night—a cancellation, perhaps. They, in turn, listed a dozen other possibilities—improbabilities, in truth, but places they’d investigate.

  I walked out of school into the dazzle of poststorm purity. If it had not been for the definite damper of having a faceless kid’s threats feel like a chronic ache, I would have been tempted to do a soft shoe down the school staircase. It was that kind of afternoon.

  But then I saw Mackenzie unfold himself from a park bench across the street. I don’t mean to imply that the sight of him is anything but pleasurable, but he looked so deliberately casual about this unscheduled visit that it was obvious something significant had happened. And Mackenzie’s variety of significant news is always, inevitably, bad. The intimation of doom that began last night and bloomed poisonously at the mailbox this a.m. grew so thick and tight, I felt as if I might suffocate.

  “This has to do with the note, doesn’t it?” I asked as we walked toward Broad Street.

  “Don’ know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “There was a creepy anonymous note in my mailbox this morning. And clippings.”

  “Kids you teach have the worst sense of humor,” he murmured, obviously thinking about something else. My Mackenzie—the noncop part I irrationally filter out and think of as the real man—was missing in action.

  “Then what brings you here, officer? I know I’m irresistible, but during business hours?” Was anybody still home in there?

  There was. “That you are, lady,” he said. “And only irresistibility could have made me willingly sit there an’ be giggled over and unsubtly examined and discussed by three dozen teeny boppers. Felt like eighth grade schoolyard all over again. So what the hell—might as well be crazy and bold.” And he took my hand, even though teenage mutant spies could be lurking anywhere.

  “So this is a social visit.” Relief is one of my favorite feelings. “A beautiful day for a stroll.”

  “Not exactly,” he said softly. He could walk and produce anxiety at the same time. “Wanted to tell you in person. Because of the irresistibility.”

  And immediately I wanted to be very resistible for at least a few trauma-free hours. What I didn’t want was whatever news Mackenzie had chosen to deliver in person. I took a deep breath.

  “It appears,” he said slowly, his deceptively soft voice like background music, “that your friend Lyle Zacharias spoke the truth, much to all of our distress. Didn’ die of indigestion or stroke or heart attack. Something, somebody, somehow, poisoned him.”

  I was surprised and flattered that he’d come all this way to tell me that in person.

  “And there’s somethin’ else.”

  Now I got it. “Don’t worry. I was annoyed the way you said it last night, but in truth, I agree. I have no interest. I don’t like what little I know about those people, and I have no ties with them, so there’s no problem. I’m not involved and I’m not in any danger. Except, maybe, from the crazy kid who left me that note.”

  “The somethin’ else is kind of major,” he went on, as if my words had been no more than dust motes. “It appears that Lyle Zacharias left the dinin’ room during dinner and did some serious nibblin’. Guess you reach a certain age, nobody warns you about ruinin’ your appetite.” He sighed again, such an enormous intake and exhale of air, I was almost ready to administer CPR—but I wasn’t sure whether he’d need it or I would.

  “He ate some tarts,” Mackenzie said. “That’s the only food we know he and nobody else ate. An’ then he died.”

  I disengaged my hand from his. “That’s absolutely ridiculous and you know it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “My mother! In all the world, of all its people, my mother is the last person who would deliberately hurt anybody!” A plump woman in a cherry-red coat clutched her Wanamaker shopping bag and edged away from me. I knew I was not completely in control, but so be it. “My mother is not a murderer!”

  Mackenzie looked sad.

  “Are you crazy?” I screamed.

  The woman in the cherry coat’s eyes showed white all around. She backed into the recessed entryway of a store, my words bouncing and echoing off the brickwork around the window.

  Crazy—crazy—crazy.

  Mackenzie continued to look sad.

  Ten

  My mother the suspect. My mother the poisoner! It was too ridiculous to give a moment’s thought. It made me furious, in fact, that Mackenzie had even let the idea slip into his brain, the words through his lips.

  My mother! All her life her single crime had been overconcern. A sort of obsessive nurturing that tilted dangerously toward meddling—but only because she was convinced that she could make things better for people.

  “Do you realize,” I demanded, “that my mother devotes every single Wednesday to trying to save the Florida manatee from speedboat propellers? Does that sound like the kind of woman who would murder someone?”

  He looked befuddled, like my students working on their analogies. Bea Pepper is to manatees as a murderer is to…

  “Why would she?” I asked while he slowly pondered. “What on earth would be her motive?” I upped my walking pace, implying, I hoped, that his outlandish suggestion hadn’t given me even momentary pause.

  “Did I say I believed it? I don’ get it, that’s all.”

  “Then I’ll help. If the tarts had anything to do with Lyle’s death, then somebody else tampered with them. Get it now?”

  “When would that have happened?” he asked in an infuriatingly mild voice.

  “You figure that part out.”

  “Hey, Mandy,” he said, “don’t kill the messenger, okay?”

  I didn’t kill him, but I didn’t have much to say to him, either. We meandered down Pine Street in silence, stopping now and then to admire an antique store’s display, although I couldn’t really focus on anything except this ridiculous suspicion. Debris—mostly early leaves from distant trees—had accumulated against the buildings in last night’s storm. I kicked at a soggy piece of newspaper, reluctant even to speculate, for fear it would be incriminating—erroneously incriminating, of course, but not worth the risk all the same.

  For example, my parents’ dispute yesterday afternoon, which I had forgotten until this minute. It replayed in my head like a poorly received radio station, full of static and omissions. I should have listened more carefully because all that was coming through was my father’s continued anger and grief over his foster sister’s death. But that was so long ago, surely he wouldn’t have…and use my mother as knowing or unknowing accomplice? I shook my head.

  “What?” Mackenzie said.

  “Nothing.” I couldn’t believe I was even hazarding these thoughts, but I was definitely not about to share them. I had never suspected how nightmarishly easy it was to plant a seed of doubt and have it flourish in even the least hospitable ground. “What kind of poison?” A ludicrous question because the answer would mean nothing to me. All I knew about poisons was that in mysteries the victim smelled of bitter almonds, a variety I certainly never heard of. Were they anything like smoked? Dry-roasted? Why were they bitter? Were they the almond-reject crop? And how did everyone who found a corpse acquire such familiarity with the aroma of those bitter nuts to recognize it, never confusing it with bitter peanuts or pecans?

  “Dunno yet. Takes time. But it doesn’t look like the standard ones.”

  “No smell of bitter almonds, I take it.”

  Mackenzie smiled. “An’ no little bottle with a skull and crossbones clutched in his death grip, either. What’s a detective to do?”

  “That about covers what I know about poisons,” I said. “Except for household cleaning agents, but surely Lyle didn’t unwittingly drink ammonia or gnaw on room freshen
er.”

  “Ah, well, there are a couple more common things, but so far, no trace of barbiturates, opiates, arsenic, or cocaine.”

  I had forgotten those, although imagining my mother trying to score some coke in order to kill Lyle Zacharias made me giggle.

  “Wish your mother hadn’t put all those warnin’s that only Lyle should touch the tarts. Like a great big finger pointing in her direction, don’t you think? That is, if the tarts turn out to be the problem, an’ the lab sure thinks they might.”

  “She meant it as a joke,” I said. “Years ago, he’d told her he hated sharing her baking. Maybe her sense of humor isn’t the best, but that’s not a criminal offense.”

  We walked a half block farther while Mackenzie looked as if he were searching for words. Finally he found them. “Now I’m the only one’s made the connection so far, an’ I haven’t said a word. But when somebody does think of your mother, what’ll I do? Say she can’t be the perp because her daughter’s my…”

  His…? If I’d been a bunny or a puppy, my ears would have pointed sideways, toward him. Eleven months past our first meeting, we were underdefined, so even though our relationship was not the relevant issue at the moment, all the same—I was his what?

  “…you know,” he said.

  His you-know. “Boy, do you have a way with words, you old flatterer, you.”

  You are my you-know, my only you-know. How could two stupid words be so depressing? If our real subject, my mother as killer, weren’t too serious for diversions, I would have declared time out for semantic analysis and emotional pulse-taking. But Mom as murderer had priority.

  “I’m not goin’ out of my way to point out who the tart-baker is,” he said, “but I can’t stop it once somebody else does. It’d look like a cover-up. In fact, it’d be a cover-up.”

  We’d define our relationship after my mother was cleared, which shouldn’t be too far in the future. Maybe by then I’d know what I wanted the definition to be. We turned left on Broad onto Philly’s answer to Hollywood, our own Walk of Fame. Ours honors the city’s musicians and music makers, of which there has been a staggering abundance.

  “You’re not takin’ this too seriously,” Mackenzie said.

  “Because, of course, my mother didn’t do it.” I stepped over Andre Watts’s bronze plaque. “She couldn’t and she wouldn’t. She came up a day early to bake for him. She was so proud of her present. She arrived carrying the ingredients, in case Philadelphia didn’t have exactly the right fruit.” I realized that what I’d just said could also be used against her. “Ah…she worried about the whipped cream. Was afraid it would turn and make him sick,” I said. “Does that sound like a poisoner?”

  We trod over Todd Rundgren and Teddy Pendergrass and were almost on top of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes before Mackenzie said, “The issue is, who killed Lyle Zacharias?”

  “Why are you so hung up on the tarts?”

  “Didn’t we already do this?” He sounded weary. “First, it’s the only food that Lyle ate and nobody else did.”

  “Which doesn’t make it poisoned. Also, that isn’t necessarily true. Maybe it’s the only food you know about that he ate that way. He might have eaten something at home, or something he brought with him—a candy bar, a flask of bourbon, who knows?”

  “And second, the old woman started screaming about them, probably after you left—”

  “Aunt Hattie.” I shook my head in annoyance.

  He glanced at me with a mild frown. “Pulled at her hair and screamed that Lyle ate the tarts, and then she fainted. Which helped point in their direction.”

  We passed Samuel Barber, Stanley Clark, and Al Martino before I had a suggestion. “Maybe Hattie did it herself and she’s trying to point the blame elsewhere.” I knew I was grabbing at a pathetically weak straw, but I kept clutching. “Last night, she accused Lizzie. Said it was all her fault, not my mother’s. And now this. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You think Harriet Zacharias killed her boy Lyle? Harriet, who nearly died of the shock of it? For whom—according to a source none other than Amanda Pepper—Lyle was her life? Tell me—why would she? Give me one reason and I’ll think about it. But meanwhile, third is that once the lab was directed to the tarts, particularly the remnants of one on a plate in the kitchen, there indeed seemed to be somethin’ unusual—haven’t said what yet—inside them. Fourth thing: it does appear, from preliminary tests, that Lyle Zacharias died of a poison. A purgative, they think.”

  “But even so, if it was the tarts, it’s only those two, which were out of the tin—”

  “Lab hasn’t had time to go through the entire contents of the tin yet. Don’ make assumptions.”

  “Well, however many, like I said, anybody could have put something into them.” When I stopped walking, I realized I was on Ed McMahon’s plaque. I have never understood what he’s doing on a musical Walk of Fame, unless I’ve missed the part of his biography when he played something besides second banana. “The tin of tarts was out on that counter for hours,” I said, continuing the dreary discussion. “She sent them by messenger in the afternoon. Anybody could have put something in them.”

  His sigh was a huff of exasperation. I didn’t respond while we crossed narrow Bach Place. At Pearl Bailey’s plaque, Mackenzie finally looked my way. “You’re sayin’ Lucretia Borgia was on the guest list, and she gets there, dressed to kill, literally, includin’ a phial of poison—just in case some other partygoer happens to bring Lyle a gift of food into which she can then dump her potion? That what you’re sayin’?”

  It didn’t seem quite as probable when spelled out that way, but I couldn’t go down without a fight. My mother was at stake, after all. “Maybe Ms. Borgia thought she’d put it in his dinner, and then she suddenly saw this better, easier opportunity. Why not?”

  This time he kept his reply and his thoughts private and simply shook his head back and forth, slowly.

  We moved toward the Bellevue, past stars highlighting the city’s gifts to rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley. Chubby Checker. Bobby Rydell. “You saw how she was last night when we came back from the hospital,” I said. “All she was worried about was everybody else—Lizzie and Hattie. Remember? And later, all the way to Beth’s, she tried to figure out how she could help, what she should do. That isn’t how a murderer behaves.”

  She’d been so agitated, so empathetic, that I’d agreed to chauffeur her to the hospital tonight. “Good God,” I said out loud. “She’s planning to bake cookies for Aunt Hattie.”

  “Maybe not the best idea. Harriet Zacharias seems a little nervous about Mom’s cookin’. Isn’t goin’ to help her heart.”

  The musicians’ names grew more august and serious, befitting their position in front of the venerable Academy of Music. Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Lanza, Eugene Ormandy, Marian Anderson, Anna Moffo, and Leopold Stokowski. How had I grown up so untalented and unmusical in this city? It was almost unpatriotic. And then we were past the wide steps to the Academy, and the classical imperative no longer held. Plaques for Dick Clark and Frankie Avalon provided a finale to the parade of stars.

  “Why do you think Ed McMahon has a plaque?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Ed McMahon. Everybody else was a musician. They make sense. Eddie Fisher, Jeanette MacDonald, Ethel Waters—all the rest—but why Ed McMahon? He sat on Johnny Carson’s right and laughed and did commercials. Why him? I mean, if Ed McMahon has a plaque, where is the justice? Where is the sense?”

  Mackenzie stared at me.

  “I am attempting to make civilized conversation,” I said. “I think we’ve exhausted the other ridiculous subject.”

  I continued toward the Bellevue feeling a sudden flulike malaise, a sort of foretaste, or fore-flu, of impending, inevitable grief.

  We reached the impressive gray hotel, the heroine of buildings. At her debut she was the most opulent in the country, and even after the flush of youth, she led a dignified existence
as “the grande dame of Broad Street.” And then Legionnaires’ disease coursed through her air-conditioned arteries and left a raddled hag, ugly, devalued, and shunned.

  But now, a decade and a half later, she was back with her face lifted, body resectioned into shops, offices, a health club, a garage, and a smaller hotel. My hat’s off to any dame who holds her ground. It gives me heart.

  We walked into the little courtyard and entered the elevator for the fourth floor ballroom. There was no way, barring another attack of Legionnaires’ disease, that the hotel was going to have an open date for a prom. I knew this was a futile investigation, so of course I became really irritable when Mackenzie suggested the same.

  “Why are you doin’ this?” he asked.

  “The kids thought the hotel would take me more seriously. It wasn’t out of my way. I don’t want them to have the first homeless prom in America.”

  “It’s their responsibility.” He was not excited at the prospect of co-chaperoning, and he made it known in a variety of situations and ways. “Shouldn’ coddle them,” he grumbled. “You’re not their mother, you know.” He paused and looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “An’ you’re not your mother, either—are you?”

  “You can portray my mother as either a coddler or as a murderer, but not both,” I snapped. “And you can remember that being an adult entails certain responsibilities concerning children’s welfare.”

  “My, oh my,” he murmured. “Feed ’em, clothe ’em, and find ’em prom sites?”

  “Help them when you can. This is an extenuating circumstance.” He, whose overprotective needs had involved the Philadelphia police force, several vans, and dangling stomach pumps, did not get it. “You want the prom canceled so that you won’t have to sit through it,” I said.