by Alice Duncan
“I’m here,” came a grumbly voice from behind Tommy. Mr. Tommy appeared as embarrassed by Hamlet’s unruly behavior as was Tommy.
Mrs. Hanratty discussed with him the advisability of him helping Tommy in future classes, and Mr. Tommy said he thought that was a good idea.
“I’m real sorry, Mrs. Majesty,” said Tommy. “I just couldn’t hold him.”
“I understand, Tommy,” I said. “I was only a little worried about Spike.” I glanced from the dog in my arms to the great Dane now being held by the leash by Mr. Tommy, and shook my head. Hamlet’s gigantic head was about level with Spike’s—and I was holding Spike! “Boy, you’d never know the two of them belonged to the same species, would you?”
“I don’t think they do,” said Mr. Tommy, sounding crabby. “Your dog comes from the species of good dogs, and Hamlet comes from the species of idiots.”
I laughed and said, “I think you’re being too hard on him. Dogs are smart. Hamlet knows he outweighs Tommy. Once you take him firmly in hand, he’ll obey both of you, I’m sure.”
“Precisely,” hooted Mrs. Hanratty. “I was just going to say the same thing.”
Mr. Tommy sighed. “All right. I have to be here anyway. Might as well join in the fun.”
“Thanks, Pa,” said Tommy, and I got the feeling his father’s capitulation to Mrs. Hanratty’s suggestion was a relief to him.
At any rate, Spike won top honors at Pasanita that day. You’ve got to admire a dachshund who isn’t intimidated by a looming great Dane.
The Hamlet incident successfully diverted my attention from whatever my husband and his friends had been plotting, and that was probably a good thing. When the class was over, all four men applauded as Spike swaggered over to them. I guess they’d watched the day’s final exam, because Billy was grinning from ear to ear, the other wounded soldiers were smiling, and even Sam had an expression of approval on his face. Boy, I didn’t see that expression aimed at me very often!
But wait. It wasn’t aimed at me. It was fixed firmly on Spike. It figured.
Chapter Fifteen
Sam stayed for dinner that night. No surprise there. What surprised me was that he remained civil to me for the entire rest of the day. My nerves began to skip like Mexican jumping beans by the time we all sat down to Vi’s superb Boston baked beans, which she served with Polish sausages and coleslaw. Pa said the sausages and coleslaw weren’t authentic Massachusetts chow, but I don’t think anyone minded that. I know I’d rather have a Polish sausage than a hunk of brown bread. Not that brown bread is icky or anything, but there’s just something about a good sausage, you know?
Naturally, we talked about Spike’s spectacular behavior during class that day.
“A great Dane, eh?” Pa looked down with wonder upon my precious pooch. Well, technically, Spike was Billy’s precious pooch, but I figured he was what the lawyers called community property. “You’re really something, Spike.”
“He is, isn’t he?” I said, happy to hear praise heaped upon Spike’s head.
“It’s a good thing that other dog didn’t have murder on its mind,” said Sam. “Spike wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
I bridled. I would. “I’m not so sure about that. I’m sure Spike would be good in a fight.”
Sam shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter if he was a dachshund Hercules if he was pitted against a great Dane. The Dane might have lost a kneecap, but I doubt that Spike could triumph in the end.”
“That’s a dismal thing to say,” I told him.
“Sorry.” Sam didn’t sound the least bit sorry.
“Say,” said Billy.
I was glad he’d interrupted, or Sam and I might have exchanged heated words, and Ma and Aunt Vi would have scolded me. Oh, boy. I, a married woman, still being scolded by my mother and my aunt. I regretted the cozy cottage Billy and I had once intended to live in even more than usual that evening.
“Do dogs have kneecaps?” Billy finished his thought.
There was a lot of looking at each other going on for a minute or so before anyone spoke. “Do dogs have knees?” I asked, curiosity having pushed my annoyance with Sam out of my mind for the moment, even though I still resented him having killed off Spike during the fictitious battle with the fictitious great Dane.
“I don’t know,” said Ma. She appeared quite baffled.
“Perhaps you can ask a veterinarian,” said aunt Vi.
“Is there a veterinarian in Pasadena?” I asked. It would probably be a good idea to find out if there was one, since Spike might get sick one day, God forbid.
“I think so,” said Billy. “Maybe someone at the humane society would know about knees on dogs.”
He and I both looked at Sam, who had mentioned the humane society once already that day.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “The only dealings I ever have with the folks from the humane society is when a dog or a cat is owned by someone affected by a crime. Then they send someone out to pick up the animal. I never thought to ask about dogs having knees or kneecaps.”
“Then why’d you say Spike might deprive a great Dane of a kneecap if they got into a fight?” I challenged him, feeling feisty on Spike’s behalf, although I’m not sure why except that Sam always seemed to get my goat.
He rolled his eyes which, naturally, peeved me. “It was only an example. A stupid one. Spike might be able to bite a great Dane’s foot before the Dane chomped him in half. Is that better?”
“No, it’s not better!” I cried indignantly. “I don’t want anything to happen to Spike. Ever.”
Sam mumbled something I didn’t catch into his baked beans.
Ma said, “Daisy, really.” See what I mean?
Pa laughed. “You’ll never get her to admit any dog is better in any way than Spike, Sam, so you might as well give it up. Maybe Spike would turn out to be a David, and the supposed great Dane would be Goliath.” He turned to me. “You like that scenario better, sweetie?”
Now I felt foolish. But I said, “Yes, I do,” because I figured I should.
“I don’t know why we talk about half the things we end up talking about at dinner,” Ma complained. “I should think dog fighting too disgusting a topic to discuss at the table.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Gumm,” said Sam. “Sorry I brought it up.”
“You didn’t bring it up,” said Ma, peering at me. “Daisy did.”
There was no way out. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s a great article about Egypt in this month’s National Geographic,” Billy said hopefully.
You can see why I loved the man. Even though he’d gone through hell and come back singed, he still did his best to protect me. What’s more, his ploy worked, and we all enjoyed a spirited discussion about Egyptian exploration. Most of us said we’d love to go to Egypt one day and see the pyramids and the sphinx and so forth. As if that would ever happen.
Nevertheless, and in spite of me, the rest of the evening passed pleasantly.
We Gumms and Majestys spent the following day peacefully, too. First came church, then a wonderful dinner prepared by Aunt Vi—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, if you’re interested—and then general napping, dog-walking, reading, a little piano-playing, and then bed. I have absolutely no idea how Sam spent his Sunday, since he didn’t intrude into our family that day.
And then came Monday.
May was almost over, and June was looming on the horizon that particular Monday morning, and I decided that I’d chance fate and select a summery costume for my spiritualistic duties that day. There’s a fine art to this dressing-as-a-spiritualist thing, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by this time. The day was going to be warm, if the past few days were anything by which to judge, yet I couldn’t be seen in any old house dress.
Therefore, I selected a plain black cotton dress with a dropped waist and short sleeves. Black isn’t a very summery color, but the fabric was thin, and besides, black fit my image. Not to mention my mood. The notion of tangling with Lola
de la Monica for another week or so made my innards curl up and squeeze. However, according to Howard, now that I’d more or less frightened Lola into fearing for the future of her career, he didn’t expect filming to take much longer than another week. Providing Lola didn’t backslide into her old temperamental ways. I tried to brace up by telling myself I could always haul out Rolly again. The notion didn’t make me feel appreciably better.
Black was a good color for me, I decided as I patted some light powder on my cheeks. It didn’t so much wash me out as stand in contrast to my pale skin, which was a good thing for a spiritualist. We spiritualists can’t go around looking too healthy and robust, after all. I even had a black straw hat to go with my ensemble, so that I would look appropriately spiritualistic whilst maintaining my own personal comfort.
“Jeez, Daisy, are you going to a funeral or something?” Billy asked as I left our bedroom, ready to depart and face my day. “Not that you don’t look good,” he added, probably because he noticed my glower.
“I feel as though I’m going to a funeral,” I admitted. “I hate this job.”
“Maybe you should quit?” he said, with a little lift to the end of the sentence as if it were more of a question than a statement.
“Maybe I should.” I sank down into a kitchen chair, since Billy was still at the table and still plowing through the Pasadena Star News. He read every word of that newspaper every single day. Well, he didn’t have anything else to do. Oh, my poor Billy.
“I know you don’t like to give up on a job that pays well,” he said.
I heaved a huge sigh. “It’s not so much that,” I said after thinking about what he’d said for a moment or two. “It’s that I have to protect my reputation. If people started talking about me as quitting before a job was done, my business might suffer.”
Billy gazed at me for a few seconds and then shook his head. “Your business.” That’s all he said, but there was a world of meaning in the two words.
I sagged. “I know. Stupid business. But—”
“It pays well,” he finished for me.
“Yes.” We sat at the table for a couple of minutes, me staring at the table cloth, Billy doing I don’t know what—because I was staring at the table cloth.
“Do you think the family would suffer a whole lot if you, say, became a telephone exchange operator?” he asked suddenly.
I looked up. “A telephone exchange operator?” I repeated blankly. “Wouldn’t that put Mildred out of a job?” Mildred Rafferty was an old pal of mine from high school. She was the one who always placed calls for me when I needed to call an operator.
“The phone company has more people than Mildred on its payroll.”
I began drawing little circles on the table cloth. “Gee, Billy, I’d never see you if I got a regular job.”
He shrugged. “You’re gone most of the time anyway.”
“That’s not true,” I said, not defending myself a bit too hotly since this present job of mine seemed to be taking me away from my family day and night. “Not most of the time, at any rate. I get to spend lots of days with you.”
“That’s true,” he admitted. “But you might get to meet more . . . normal people if you worked at a regular job.”
“Normal people?” I wasn’t sure what he meant. Sure, he’d beefed at me about hanging out with rich people, and at one time he even accused me of being a social climber, but he didn’t mean it. Any more than he’d meant it when he’d accused me of running around on him with Johnny Buckingham. Johnny Buckingham, for Pete’s sake, the most moral, upright human male on the face of the earth.
He gave me another shrug. “Yeah. I mean people like us. Not rich people. You know, people like your family. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable being around folks like us than all those rich picture people? They sure aren’t normal.”
“I hope to heck they aren’t.” I actually shuddered as I contemplated Lola de la Monica. If that was normal, I didn’t want anything to do with normality. Or “normalcy,” as our president had called it once. Then again, he’d offered somebody a “generalcy,” too. He might not have been too smart, President Harding, but he sure looked presidential. Actually, thinking about politicians made my mood lighten slightly. “Picture people may be a strange lot, but they’re better than politicians, who are all crooks,” I told Billy.
He laughed. I always felt good when Billy laughed.
“You’re probably right about that,” he said. Then he gave a little sigh. “Well, don’t take any guff from Lola today, all right?”
“I’ll sure try not to,” I said. Then I got up, feeling as if I were hefting a ninety-pound sack of sand rather than my own regulation-sized body. “I’d better go. I need to get there before Lola begins kicking up a fuss.”
Billy lifted the newspaper and snapped it open. “Say hello to Sam for me.”
That’s right. Not only did I have to deal with Lola the Lunatic, but I also had to endure another day of Sam Rotondo’s company. I don’t suppose dealing with Sam would bother me so much if I weren’t attempting with all my wits and strength to keep him from learning about the letters Lola and Monty had been getting.
It then occurred to me that ever since I’d met him, my entire life seemed to have been involved in keeping things from Sam Rotondo. It got darned tiring, too, curse it.
And then something much better occurred to me: it was way past time I dropped by to see how Flossie Buckingham was getting along; you know, now that she was going to have a baby and all. Flossie, having come from very dire circumstances, was easy to talk to about stuff. So was Johnny, who, as a captain in the Salvation Army, had seen and heard darned near everything and knew all there was to know about Billy’s situation. And mine. Maybe I’d just pop by the Salvation Army after I got off work today. Heck, I might even leave the wretched set early.
Life didn’t seem so bleak after I’d made that decision. Mind you, I wasn’t exactly cheerful, but thinking about friends made me feel not so alone with my problems, if you know what I mean.
My mood lifted even more when I set out to drive to the Winkworth mansion. The Chevrolet tootled down the pepper-tree-lined Marengo Avenue where our modest bungalow sat, and it seemed to me as though the entire neighborhood shone in the morning sunlight. Mrs. Killebrew, our neighbor across the street, waved to me as I drove past, and I waved back. Mrs. Killebrew had been most grateful for a service I’d rendered the citizens of Pasadena a few months earlier, and recalling that made me feel not nearly so glum. I did do some good in the world, even when, as then, I didn’t much want to.
Everyone’s gardens were looking lovely. Even our garden looked good. Pa had planted rose bushes near the porch, along with a hydrangea plant that was budding already. Pa was careful to prune the bush so that the blue clusters, which would burst into bloom any day now, would be huge. It was a good thing that Pa liked tending to the garden, since Billy wasn’t able to do it and all the women in the family had to go out to work. Gee, that seemed so backward. But it worked for us. Anyhow, we didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.
But there I went again, thinking negatively. I sucked in a big breath of fresh May air and turned my mind to other people’s yards, which were very pretty. What was more, the house—or estate, I suppose is a better word—to which I was at that moment driving by, had spectacular gardens and magnificent green, rolling lawns. The fact that it also contained a crazy actress was an aberration. A single blot on an otherwise perfect setting.
Well, except for those thrice-cursed letters. Oh, bother. I wished I hadn’t thought about those blasted letters.
Anyhow, my nominally sunny mood didn’t last much past the great gate of the Winkworth estate. Even before I parked the Chevrolet, my heart sank. An entire delegation seemed to await my arrival, and I darned near turned around and motored the other way. But there was no escape. By the time I got the Chevrolet headed in the right direction, the gate would be shut against me. I was trapped.
Harold w
as the first to greet me. He rushed to my door and flung it open, in fact. Not bothering with pleasantries, I asked, “What’s wrong now?”
“Lola got a letter, and your detective friend got hold of it. Now Lola’s hysterical and Detective Rotondo is furious.”
Oh, goody. Just what I wanted to hear. “Why’s Sam mad? Does he know about Monty’s letters?”
“No, but he suspects you knew about Lola’s letters and didn’t tell him.”
“Is that what Lola told him?”
“No. He guessed.”
“Darn him anyhow! How come he always thinks I’m at fault when bad things happen?”
Harold grinned. “Because you are?”
“That isn’t funny, Harold Kincaid.”
He sobered at once. “I know it’s not. We’ve got to keep him from finding out about Monty’s letters. Even if the writer doesn’t aim to expose his secret, we have to keep it from the police.”
“Mrs. Majesty, I hate to bother you so early on a Monday morning, but could you please come? Quickly? Lola’s in a state, and that detective fellow isn’t helping matters.”
I glanced over Harold’s shoulder to see the man who’d spoken: a grim-faced John Bohnert, who looked as if he wanted to murder someone. My guess would be Lola.
Lillian Marshall stood beside him, wringing her hands, and Gladys Pennywhistle’s eyeglasses glared in the sunlight much as I suspected Gladys herself was glaring behind them. I didn’t see Homer Fellowes anywhere. If the man was still enamored of Lola de la Monica, I’d have to reassess my notion of pairing him with Gladys. If he still had what my friends called a “crush” on Lola after all her shenanigans, he was definitely not the right person for Gladys, who wouldn’t have a crush on an idiot like Lola for worlds. Well . . . all right, so I guess she had a crush on Monty Montgomery, but at least he wasn’t always throwing fits and tantrums. I suppressed a sigh.