Scot & Soda

by Catriona McPherson

  “Why would she lie about the reunion dress code?” I said. “It’s so easy to check.”

  “No idea,” said Todd. “Moving on. Call Noleen while you’ve got my phone, and ask her if she knows where the old Worth place is.”

  “Where are we going in the meantime?” I said.

  “Historic downtown Cuento,” said Todd. “As long as it’s not a farm, any place with ‘old’ in its name is going to be downtown somewhere.”

  Historic downtown Cuento is an area three by two blocks with brick-fronted buildings that used to be family department stores and drugstores with soda fountains, and are now bicycle repair shops and yoga studios. It’s zoned so’s you never have to cross the road to get a cup of coffee, and you never have to cross two to get some Korean barbecue. It is, in other words, California. Oh how California historic downtown Cuento is! And I love it. There are dog bowls and shade trees and outdoor pianos. There are pocket parks with chess tables and Little Free Libraries. There’s a book shop. There’s an art cinema. There’s a Jamaican barber just to stop it feeling too precious altogether.

  And there’s Mama Cuento. She’s an eight-foot-tall statue on the corner of First and Main, where she stands with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back saying hmp-hmp-hm to everyone who passes by. Her bronze head is wrapped in a cloth and her bronze feet, just peeking out from the hem of her dress, are bare. Her collar is open as if she’s been working in the heat of a long day and her face has seen it all. I assumed she was African American at first, because of the colour of the bronze (which was pretty stupid of me) and the headwrap, I suppose. Todd reckons she’s Latina because of her name, but she’s pretty goddamn tall for a Latina lady and she’s got a long lean-muscled back that doesn’t exactly scream Mexico. Most of Cuento thinks she’s “regular American,” and if you take that to mean Native they roll their eyes and mutter at you. Noleen told me once there was a move to change her name to Town Mother back in the fifties, but it went nowhere.

  Anyway, we hooked round Mama Cuento and into the residential bit of the historic district, with me on the phone to Noleen to mine her city memories for directions. She didn’t know the street address, but she told us it was the one with the wraparound porch and the two turrets “painted the color God regrets” and it didn’t take long to track it down. It was purple, with a bit of orange and black in the trim, a house made for Halloween. And yet this was the place where the residents had got their act together to de-pumpkin-ise in good time. As we went up the walk, a large woman in grey sweats was cramming an armload of black crêpe paper into the wheeliebin.

  “Let me help,” Todd said, sweeping her aside and applying his considerable muscles to a bale of paper, straw, tattered ribbons, fake cobweb, and tangled lantern-lights, compacting it enough to close the bin lid.

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “Thank you so much.” She seemed upset; fluttery and with a lot of looking over her shoulder as if someone might be watching.

  “Is this bin bag going in too?” I said, holding one up. “Trash—can—bag—garbage—sack?”

  “If there’s room,” the woman said. She was wringing her hands now like the heroine of a Victorian romance and her breath was coming quick and light. I’d never had to catch someone as they fainted and I didn’t fancy my chances with this little fireplug.

  “Are you Miss Worth?” Todd said, when the bin bag was squished in and the lid was down again. “John Worth’s sister?”

  “Becky,” she said. “Yes. Why? Are you reporters?”

  Which was an extremely peculiar conclusion to jump to. Todd sent a side glance at me, but I had no more clue than he did how to answer.

  “No,” I said after a long pause. “You can relax. We’re not reporters and we’re not police.”

  Becky’s shoulders dropped. “Thank God,” she said. “So … who are you?”

  “We found Tam’s body,” I said.

  “What? When? Where?” Becky said. “Was it you that put it in the creek?”

  Which was an extremely peculiar question to ask.

  “No,” I said. “I live in the houseboat at the back of the motel on Last Ditch slough and we hauled it up with our beer box at a Halloween party.”

  “Oh,” said Becky. “You’re that therapist!”

  “I’m that therapist. And we feel involved now. So we want to find out what we can about Tam Shatner.”

  “Right,” said Becky. “Right. Well, that was Johnny’s year, not mine. I didn’t ever get to know all the details, but you know … small towns … we heard rumors and rumbles. And now this!”

  “Mm,” said Todd. “You understand why we’re so concerned, don’t you? If this was a hate crime … ”

  Becky frowned. “A hate crime?” she said. “What d’you mean? Aren’t hate crimes like the Klan?”

  She would have said more but the screen door at the back of the deep porch opened and a man came thundering over the boards to lean on the porch rail and bellow at us.

  Bellow at her, I realised once I started paying attention to what he was saying.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Who the hell are they? What have you said? Did you—” But he bit that off. “I told you to come back inside.” Eventually he managed to make himself stop talking and stood there, gripping the rail with two meaty fists. I saw a class ring winking on one finger. He was breathing like a bull, and—added to his strong forehead, broken button nose, and underbite—it was a pretty comprehensive impersonation.

  “John Worth?” I said. If I looked closely, I could just about trace the boy I’d seen in the yearbook. He had been burly with a fair complexion, a twinkling blond crew-cut, and dimples. This man had doubled in weight, lost his hair, and turned the deep brick red of a golf bum. He had pale blue tattoos on his forearms and ropes of gold chains tangled in his grey chest hair. He would definitely have worn a Hawaiian shirt to his high school reunion. He was wearing one now. And cargo shorts and flip flops.

  “Who wants to know?” he said.

  “Lexy Campbell,” I told him. “And this is Todd Kroger. We want to talk to you about your friend, Tam Shatner.”

  “No friend of mine,” Worth said.

  “Oh now, Johnny,” said his sister.

  “I wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire,” he added. “What do you want to know about him?”

  “Who killed him, ideally,” I said. “But we’d settle for who saw him at the reunion, who spoke to him last, when he left, and where he went.”

  “I spoke to him last.” Worth was still gripping the porch rail to look down at us, and as he said these words he flexed his fingers and took a tighter hold. His class ring made a dull clunk against the painted wood. “I saw him arrive, I went straight over, and I threw him out of there. Told him he wasn’t welcome and he should haul his sorry ass back to f—”

  “Back to …?” I said.

  “Excuse my language,” Worth said. “I shouldn’t cuss in front of a lady.”

  “And he left, did he?” I said. “He took off like a good boy?”

  “He walked away on his own two feet,” Worth said. “He ate nothing. He drank nothing. He spoke to no one. He arrived, I told him to fuck off, and he fucked off.”

  “Excused,” I said. Worth blinked at me, uncomprehending.

  “And how many people were there in total?” said Todd. His voice was worryingly calm.

  “Hunnert fifty?” Worth said. “All of us and some spouses. Coupla dozen kids too.”

  “You really think Tam Shatner was the only one at that party?” Todd said. “Out of a hundred and fifty people? You’re kidding yourself. Or did you send anyone else away, like you sent Tam?”

  “Maybe Tam was the only one who was stubborn enough to attend,” I said. “Maybe all the others in the class of sixty-eight wouldn’t stoop to it.”

  “What?” said Becky.

>   John Worth said nothing. He just looked at Todd out of his little bullish eyes, all squinted up from the pads of fat on his cheeks. He munched his jaws a bit too. Perhaps he’d found a morsel between his molars and wasn’t literally ruminating. But it didn’t help him look any less bovine. “Only one what?” he said, eventually.

  “Oh right!” scoffed Todd. “You didn’t know what he was.”

  “What he was?” said Worth.

  “So why’d you run him out?” I said.

  Worth let go of the porch rail and his arms fell heavily at his sides. “I didn’t,” he said. “He wasn’t there. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  Join the club, I thought. What I said was, “So you didn’t see him, didn’t run him out of the reunion, didn’t follow him?”

  “Follow him?” said Worth, raising his massive head. His breathing sounded laboured.

  “Well, he could hardly get shot in the middle of a party,” said Todd. “Not without someone noticing. Even with a silencer.”

  “Shot?” Worth’s voiced was ragged and his colour was changing.

  “Yes,” I said. “Shot. It was in the paper.” But even as I said it, I wondered if my memory was betraying me. Dead four days and foul play had been in the paper. I would need to check.

  “I thought he drowned,” Worth was saying. His face wasn’t even red now. It had darkened to a colour I’d be hard-pressed to name.

  “He drowned?” said Becky.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” said her brother. Becky looked at her phone and started. She trotted over to a car parked on the driveway at the side of the house and hopped in, peeling out on two tyres into the quiet street. I watched her go and then blinked, focussing on the other car, presumably John Worth’s car, still parked there. It was that same cat groomer’s decal again, 02-15-11 COCO, but this time I knew it was on a different vehicle from the one that had been in front of me in the coffee queue and parked at the Thrift. This one was red and low-slung. A … Cala … Cama … A red car.

  “Is that yours?” I said, pointing. “With the phone number on the back?”

  Worth stared at me. His face wasn’t red now. It had gone white behind his tan, a truly awful shade to behold. Todd was looking down at his phone.

  “Let’s go, Lexy,” he said.

  “Yeah, get off my property,” said John Worth. “And don’t come back.”

  “Not even to piss if it catches fire,” I agreed.

  “Lexy!” Todd hissed. “Let’s go.”

  Fourteen

  What is it?” I said, when the front door on the old Worth place had slammed and we were off his property, back on the street quick-marching to where the Jeep was parked.

  “Roger.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s got information.”

  “Well, just wait while I get a good hold of this stone and squeeze some blood out!” I said. “What information?”

  “Tam wasn’t shot,” said Todd. He chirped the Jeep open and clambered in. “Why were you asking about John Worth’s car?” he said, when I had clambered in too.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s change the subject. That seems like a great idea. What do you mean he wasn’t shot?”

  “Roger doesn’t want to put it in an email or say it over the phone. So we either wait till he’s home tonight or we go up to the hospital and grab him between rounds.”

  “Let’s take him a burrito,” I said. “Poor thing, having to work on a Saturday.”

  I’d only visited Roger at work once before, when I presented a workshop on “self-care in times of crisis” to a parents’ support group. It wasn’t successful. None of the parents believed my combination of pizza and bad telly would deliver the results I knew it would, and when I told them it had got me through a divorce and they asked what about the children and found out I didn’t have any, they all folded their arms and gave me the stink-eye. Some of it was figurative, but some of it was literally elbows and eyelids. But even the workshop wasn’t as bad as the complimentary lunch afterwards in the cafeteria. A salad of pink-edged iceberg lettuce and chewy croutons with shriveled grapes for fancy and one of those bog-awful flavoured waters.

  Todd was pulling up at the taco wagon and my stomach was already rumbling.

  Ten minutes later, with three giant Al Pastor burritos ir and three twenty-ounce watermelon juices, one with light ice because of the daylight robbery ice scam I was onto, we were on our way.

  “Ir!” said Todd.

  “It means ‘to go’ en Espanol,” I pointed out.

  “It means ‘to go’ like ‘I go, you go, he she and it go.’”

  “And he knew what I meant.”

  “He knew what you meant because he’s had years of gringos who think they can speak Spanish saying it to him.”

  “Don’t say gringo.”

  “Sorry. Gabacho.”

  “Don’t say gabacho.”

  “You have no idea what gabacho means, do you?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Para llevar.”

  “Don’t say—”

  “Oh for God’s sake! Para llevar means food ‘to go.’”

  “Are you okay?” I said. It wasn’t like him to be so testy.

  “Worried about Roger,” was all he would give me. Then we were on the freeway and he had to concentrate. It’s not that big a city, Sacramento, but it wears its “worst drivers in America” badge with pride and Saturdays aren’t any better just because the Capitol staffers have all piled up to Tahoe or down to San Francisco. The weaving, texting, and random speed changes took every bit of Todd’s attention until we came off at the hospital exit. And the ambulances didn’t help much.

  “How do you feel, coming back?” I said as we made our way from the car to the paediatrics entrance.

  “This isn’t coming back,” Todd said. “I didn’t work here. I worked in ambulatory care, way across campus.”

  “Ambulatory care!” I said. I knew he meant outpatient and it still tickled me.

  “What do you call median strips again, Lexy?” Todd said.

  “Central reservations,” I said. “What do you call GPs?”

  “Primary care physicians,” said Todd. “What do you call a plainclothes cop who’s not a sarge?”

  “I’m not sure how the ranks map onto each other.”

  “What are the possibilities?”

  “Either detective inspector, detective chief inspector, chief superintendent, or maybe just detective constable. Yeah, you win.”

  Todd might never have worked at the kids’ bit of this sprawling hospital, but he was known here. The nurses on the frontline greeted him like the messiah. There were hugs, tears, selfies, and even one cheek-pinch before Roger answered his page.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re just in time for lunch. It’s seafood day at the mac-and-cheese window.”

  I held up the package of food and tray of drinks. “Burritos and watermelon juice.”

  “From Chipotle?” Roger said.

  “Have we met?” said Todd. “From the wagon on E Street and they’re getting cold.”

  I felt mean sitting in the café eating a shoebox-sized roll of goodness while everyone else choked down fishy pasta, but we were far enough away not to hear the moans of jealousy. Roger had insisted on this quiet corner and then he sat with his broad, scrub-clad back facing the room, daring anyone to come and disturb us. Todd gave a couple of finger waves to people he recognised but then shifted so no one could see him. I was in plain sight, but no one was likely to come belting over to bother me.

  “So,” said Todd, after a good bite, a luxurious chew, and a slug of juice, “he wasn’t shot.”

  Roger swallowed, took a glug of his own drink, and shook his head. “He wasn’t shot. And the police—well, Mike, I su
ppose—are kicking themselves for being fooled.”

  “I would think she is,” I said. “How do you think you’ve seen a GS—gunshot wound if you haven’t? Belly-button piercing gone wrong?”

  “Oh no, it was a gunshot wound,” said Roger.

  “An old one?” Todd guessed.

  “Okay, I’ll stop toying with you,” said Roger. He took a mammoth bite of his burrito. He was in the middle of it now, through to the good bit, and he chewed in a state of bliss with his eyes closed. Then he swallowed, huddled even closer, and spilled all.

  “The on-call pathologist on Wednesday night was someone I happen to know,” he said. “Todd, don’t freak, okay?”

  “Is this the Maurice guy?” Todd said.

  “This is the Maurice guy,” Roger said. “Lexy, I have no interest in this guy—he looks like Mr. Burns and dresses like Columbo—but he isn’t getting the message. He’s … friendly bordering on stalker, you know? And he knew where the corpse was found and … I wasn’t happy to discover it, but … he knows that’s where I’ve been living.”

  “He does?” said Todd.

  “Which, yes, is a worry,” said Roger, “because I haven’t changed my official address and all the mail goes to a PO box and so I’m not sure how he found out, but anyways. Here’s the silver lining to a pretty black cloud. He told me what they found in the autopsy.”

  “He emailed you?” said Todd.

  “No, he’s not dumb enough to do that,” said Roger.

  “He called you?” said Todd. “He has your number?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Roger. “No, he came over this morning, oh-so casual, shooting the breeze.”

  “Over from where?” said Todd. “Where does he work?”

  “Pathology,” said Roger. “What with him being a pathologist and all.”

  “Todd, please,” I said. “We can loop back. What came out in the autopsy?”

  “He was wearing a Halloween costume,” Roger said.

  “Right,” I said. “A Jimmy wig. Stapled on.”