Val & Pals Boxed Set: Volumes 1,2 & the Prequel (Val & Pals Humorous Mystery Series)

by Margaret Lashley

  I distracted myself by nosing around his apartment. His room was on the corner of the building, and was only slightly bigger than my “deluxe digs,” as Tina had described them. One open space served as the dining, living, and cooking area. Like me, he had a terrace and a private bathroom. The only differences were his tiny kitchenette and an extra, separate room for the bedroom.

  Looking around the place, it was obvious Friedrich had been here a while. Family pictures lined the top of a bookshelf used as makeshift storage and as a dumping ground for mail and magazines. I walked to the terrace. A small metal table and two folding chairs had been set up among a jungle of potted plants. I glanced around the rest of the living room. It contained the typical, boring bachelor-pad stuff – except for one corner. It was stacked high with an odd assortment of electronic equipment. Green and red lights blinked like fireflies from the boxes, and at least one was giving off a weird buzzing sound.

  “What’s all that?” I asked as he handed me a glass of wine.

  “I’ll explain you in a minute, but first, a toast.”

  I dutifully looked into the German’s blue eyes and held up my glass.

  “Prost. That is a traditional German toast.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “In your language? Cheers, I suppose.”

  “Well then, prost!”

  We took our first sips of wine, eyes locked.

  “Do you like to funk?” asked Friedrich, his eyes still locked on mine.

  I nearly inhaled my wine. “Excuse me?”

  “Are you interested in funking?”

  I felt my legs go weak. “Ummm…I….”

  Friedrich eyed me curiously. “Don’t tell me you never did it before.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Do you still remember how?”

  “Um. Well. I think so. Yeah.”

  “You can play with mine, if you want. Here, let me show you.”

  Friedrich reached toward me and my knees plum near buckled out from under me. I braced for impact, but his hand went past me and grabbed hold of a chair behind me. He pulled it toward the corner of the room and motioned for me to sit. He leaned over me from behind the chair and put a hand on my shoulder. His other arm reached forward. I closed my eyes in anticipation….

  “Here is the power switch. I can tune it to American radio stations, if you want.”

  “What?” My eyes flew open. Friedrich’s hand was twirling a knob on something that looked like a stereo.

  “What do you call funk in America? Oh ya. Ham radio. All of this equipment is my ham radio station.”

  Relief and disappointment washed over me like a bucket of ice water down my back.

  “Oh. I see.” I laughed nervously. “Friedrich, how about we do this later?” I bolted out of the chair. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Spätzle and lentils, my favorite German food.”

  “What’s a spätzle?” I asked.

  “It is a fancy name for noodles.” Friedrich walked to the kitchenette and picked up a ball of light-yellow dough. He held it up for me to see. “Watch.” Friedrich rubbed the dough ball across what looked like a cheese grater. Stringy dollops of dough fell into a bowl. “That’s a spätzle. “Lentils are –”

  “Beans,” I said, cutting him off. “That I know. No meat?”

  “Did you want some meat?” He looked a bit taken aback.

  “Oh! No. I just thought that Germans typically ate a lot of meat…sausages and stuff.”

  “Ah. But remember, I am not the typical German.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I forgot.” I smiled apologetically.

  Friedrich waved my faux pas away like a gnat in the wind. He finished making the spätzle and dropped it into a waiting pot of boiling water. I watched as he carried out his culinary tasks with the comfort and ease of a man used to doing his own cooking. Before I could finish my wine, he had filled two plates from the well-worn pots on his two-burner stove and carried them to the terrace. I followed him outside.

  The steamy piles of noodles and lentils slowly disappeared along with the sun as we dined and chatted the evening away.

  “I use the ham radio to talk to people all over the world,” said Friedrich. “You should try it. You will like it.”

  “How did you learn it?”

  “From my father. He loved to talk on it. Some of that equipment is his.”

  “Oh! Do you and he talk on the radio together?”

  “No. He died of a heart attack. I was halfway around the world at the time. I couldn’t get to his funeral. I still regret it.”

  “How long ago did he die?”

  “Hmmm. It has been seventeen years now.”

  That’s a long time to hold onto regrets. “How about your mom?”

  “She’s turning eighty in December. My sister is putting together a party for her. That’s a big deal for Olga. She and my mother don’t get along very well.”

  “Too different?”

  “No. Too much alike.”

  “Oh. Do you have any other brothers or sisters?”

  “Not any more. My other sister Birgit died of breast cancer two years ago.”

  I was beginning to understand the source of the sadness that appeared so often in Friedrich’s solemn blue eyes. But he wasn’t the only one to have to live with the loss of loved ones. My own father had died nearly a decade ago. And both Grandma Violet and Grandpa Hue were long dead and buried.

  “Shall we go to bed?” Friedrich asked abruptly.

  I nearly inhaled my sip of wine. I nodded, too choked to speak.

  “I will start the movie.”

  He stood up and disappeared into the bedroom, leaving me alone on the terrace. I swallowed the lump in my throat, picked up the empty plates and went inside. I set the plates in the kitchen.

  “Come!” Friedrich called from his bedroom. I walked to the doorframe. “Lie down,” he instructed.

  I scooted onto the right side of the bed and propped my head up on a pillow. I could smell the earthy musk of him in the white cotton bedsheets. He slid a DVD into the player and lay down on the other side of the bed, leaving a good foot of space between us. He smiled at me for a brief second, then turned his attention to the TV.

  The Passion of the Christ turned out to be the most violent and bloody movie I’d ever seen. I closed my eyes repeatedly to escape horrific images I knew would otherwise haunt me forever. I understood why Friedrich said he’d felt “destroyed” by it. Between squinty grimaces and hiding my face in my hands, at some point I realized Friedrich had turned over on his side. He lay facing the wall, asleep.

  I turned the sound down on the DVD player and listened to Friedrich as he snored lightly. It had been a long time since I’d heard the sound of another person breathing beside me. After witnessing the horrors played out in the movie, the sound of his snoring comforted me. I lay there until I felt my own calmness return. I climbed carefully out of bed and snuck quietly out of the room. As the door to his apartment closed with a click, I realized I’d had nothing to agonize about. He just wanted to be friends. I vowed to stop over-analyze things, and to never wear thong underwear again. Ever!

  Chapter Twelve

  Just when I was getting to know Berta, she up and disappeared.

  It was dinner time, and, as usual, the running joke amongst my fellow volunteers was what the “mystery meat” would be disguised as tonight. The mystery meat was a flat, thin, brown slice of animal hide about the same size, shape and tenderness as the heel of an Italian loafer. In fact, it could very well have been that some poor guy was limping lopsided around Italy as we tried in vain to carve up his shoe.

  The leathery hunk of animal flesh first appeared on the dinner menu a week ago, disguised as “prime rib.” Those who had ordered it (Frank and Val II – karmic justice?) had complained so loudly about it that we’d all been made well aware of the culprit’s existence and its inedibility.

  Every night since then, the villainous cut of meat had attempted t
o pass itself off on unsuspecting diners under the guise of “veal picatta,” then “pork medallion,” and my personal favorite “beef tenderloin.” No matter what the chef decided to call it for the night, the beastly hunk of sinew and gristle always kept the same form and shape. It was indestructible.

  The only person to have actually managed to wound the formidable hunk of flesh was Frank. That first night he’d sawed a sliver off the side of it and chewed it until his jaw hurt. Finally, he’d given up and, in a real touch of class, had passed the masticated mess around in a napkin for our dining pleasure.

  Last night, the mystery meat was disguised as “carne assado,” grilled meat. Tina had been the unfortunate soul to order it. When it arrived, we’d all recognized it right away and burst out laughing. Tina had laughed along with us, then speared the thing with her knife and held it up like the booby prize in a gift exchange.

  “Maybe they should have called it carnage assado,” she’d quipped.

  Accident-prone Peter had fallen out of his chair laughing at her joke. He’d leaned back in his chair and placed both hands on a stitch in his side when his chair had gone out from under him. But working for the IRS must have given Peter a hide as thick as a rhinoceros. To his credit, he’d simply gotten up, dusted himself off, and dug his fork back into his linguini marinara. He uttered not even a whimper about his knee, which was still bandaged from his run-in with a scooter a few days back.

  After ten nights of mystery-theater dining under our belts, tonight we were all abuzz with anticipation. Would it be Tina in the blue dress with the sirloin?

  “Tina, you were the last one to have it,” Peter said. “What do you think it’ll be called tonight?”

  Tina rolled her eyes. “Who knows?”

  “It’s weird,” I said. “The rest of the food here is so good. How can they keep getting the meat so wrong?”

  “I have a theory,” Tina offered. “I bet it’s the same exact piece of meat. Think about it. It’s always the same shape and size. I say whoever gets it next should tag it. Put some kind of mark on it or something, so we can identify it if it comes back around.”

  “It couldn’t be the same piece of mean!” objected Val II. “The hotel would be under some kind of code violation. Right Frank?”

  “Right, Val,” Frank said supportively. “Besides, I cut a piece off of it once. And a couple of times two or three of us had it at the same time.”

  “Yeah, but nobody else has been able to make a dent in it but you,” Tina argued. “It could be that they are, let’s say, recycling the intact ones.”

  “It would be a viable way to reduce overhead,” Peter said.

  “That’s revolting!” Val II cried. “They’d better not be doing that!”

  “You’d be surprised at what some people will do to save money,” Peter added. His tone assured us that we didn’t want to know the gory details. “I say let’s do what Tina suggested. Let’s tag it. We could put a toothpick in the center.”

  “Have you got a drill to make the hole?” Frank laughed loudly at his own joke.

  “If it comes back to me with a toothpick, I’ll sue this place,” said Val II, her Botox-paralyzed face twisted in indignation.

  As we spoke, Giuseppe tiptoed around us like a thief in the night and laid tonight’s menus on our plates.

  “Why don’t we just vote on it,” Frank said.

  He stood and banged his handle of his dinner knife on the table for us to come to order. The look on the attorney’s red face made my mind flash to a scene from Lord of the Flies.

  “Those for tagging, raise your hands,” he barked.

  Slowly, hands went up: mine, Tina’s and Peter’s.

  “That’s three for,” Peter reported.

  “Those against?” Frank raised his hand and looked down at Val II.

  She smiled up at Frank sheepishly and raised her hand.

  “That’s two against,” Peter said.

  “Wait. There’s six of us,” I said. “Where’s Berta?”

  Everyone looked around, as if they expected to find the old woman squatting between the chairs or under the table.

  “I don’t know where Berta is,” said Tina. “But I think I just found tonight’s mystery meat.” She held up her menu and pointed at an entree. “It’s gotta be the “Sucking Pig.”

  ***

  No one had noticed Berta missing before dinnertime. The last time I’d seen her was this morning. She’d gotten up early again and joined me at breakfast to deliver her second-cheapest therapy session ever. The bill had come to two cappuccinos. I remembered that she was dressed like Kermit the frog.

  “Nice sweater,” I’d said cheerfully to Berta when she’d sat down to join me at the breakfast table. She’d looked down at her bright green sweater as if she’d never seen it before.

  “This?” she’d croaked as she’d pulled on the sweater at a spot above her right breast. “Kid, don’t patronize me. You wouldn’t be caught dead in this polyester frog outfit. I know it. You know it.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I’d backpedaled. “Besides, if you don’t like it, why wear it?”

  “Keeps the creeps away.” She’d drawn her boney face closer to mine. “Val, if I wanted to get laid, I wouldn’t choose this outfit. But I don’t speak much Italian, see?”

  “No. I don’t see.”

  “Look. Here, I want to look like somebody’s dear old granny. That way, everybody treats me nice. Cheaper cab fare here. A free cup of coffee there. These clothes…this sweater…they’re just…props. They help me get what I want. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Oh,” I’d replied, dumbfounded. “Is everything you do so…calculated?”

  “Let’s just suffice it to say I don’t do too many things unconsciously anymore. At my age, I want to be awake every minute I’m awake, if you know what I mean.”

  I’d nodded. “Yeah. I get it. Want a cappuccino?”

  “Sure. What’s it gonna cost me?”

  “Just a few minutes of your precious time, Madame.”

  “Better hurry. That may be all I’ve got left.”

  I’d laughed out loud.

  “Come on, Berta, you’ve got more life left in you than most people I know. Besides, the half-life on that sweater’s got to be at least another hundred years. You might as well get your money’s worth.”

  Berta had stared at me for a second, then thrown back her head and laughed her ass off. When her grey-haired noggin had finally come forward again, she’d wiped tears from her twinkling eyes.

  “Okay, you got me, kid. That laugh alone was worth five minutes of free advice. Shoot.”

  I’d smiled at the geriatric frog and grabbed the chance she offered.

  “Okay. Yesterday you told me that everyone makes their own choices in life – to paraphrase you, ‘We either chase our dreams or dig our graves.’”

  “Nice. Mind if I steal that line?”

  “Consider it yours. So. I get that. But what I don’t get is why Frank and Val II are so damn disapproving of me. Of everyone, really.”

  Berta had scrunched her mouth sideways, but said nothing.

  “It’s weird,” I’d continued, searching for the right words, “but it’s almost as if they believe that there’s only so much happiness to go around, and…and –”

  “And you took it all.”

  “Yes! Exactly! How do you keep doing that?”

  “Seen it a million times. It’s all part of the same thing we talked about yesterday. It’s the classic victim-versus-champion mentality. A victim doesn’t take responsibility for her life. That way, she can’t be held accountable for its sorry state.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand because you’re not a victim, Val. You’re a champion. You pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You make the best of a given situation. Like with your luggage. That’s how I knew what kind of person you are. A victim would have wallowed in self-pity and blamed the world for her rotten luck. You
came out punching with an arsenal of jokes and laughs. A formidable sense of humor is the hallmark of a champion, kid. Believe me. You’re a champion.”

  “Thanks, Berta. I appreciate that. But answer me this. Why in the world would those two think my happiness was stealing from their happiness?”

  “Because it’s easier for them to say you took their happiness than to admit to themselves that they threw theirs away.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty profound, Berta.”

  She’d flashed me a smile and waggled her eyebrows. “Not bad for an old lady in a frog suit.”

  ***

  We were almost through dinner. Berta still hadn’t shown up. No one had ordered the “Sucking Pig,” so our toothpick experiment remained theoretical for the moment.

  “Did you see Berta today?” Tina asked me as our desserts arrived.

  “I saw her at breakfast. She told me she was off today, but I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Did she mention any plans to go anywhere?” Frank asked.

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “Think, Val,” Frank demanded impatiently, as if I’d been too lazy in my first attempt. “Did she say anything that may have implied a trip, illness, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “I rang her room but no one answered,” Peter said, returning to the table. “I also checked the front desk. There was no note.”

  “Isn’t there a rule about going off without proper notification?” Val II asked.

  “We should get the key and check inside her room,” Frank said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Val II said.

  She and Frank got up and left the dining room. As I watched them disappear, Tina leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “I don’t think it’s any of their business to go in Berta’s room. I’d be pissed if they did that to me.”

  I felt the same way. But I’d already learned my lesson about trying to talk reason into Frank. He and Val II were definitely in charge of this rescue mission. I ate my cannoli and kept my mouth shut. A few minutes passed, and the dictator and his minion mistress returned.