How I Spent My Summer Vacation (16 page)

“But I got a job then.” She trotted behind me, as if my words had been no more than white sound. “I had to. Didn’t have a cent. I worked in a discount luggage store. Three years, and then I was a recession cutback. My rent went up. My son’s wife left him and their boy and he needed help, and money for help.” Her voice dropped to dirge level. “A woman alone…”

Oh, goody. You could really try hard and things could still get worse. Things
would
get worse. First aid for the insufficiently depressed.

“He liked me,” Lala said. “Tommy. But I could not get him to go one step further, to get off the stick, you understand?”

It’s an interesting expression:
get off the stick.
Doesn’t make any sense when you think about it, unless it meant get unstuck. But yes, I definitely understood what she meant.

“So I thought,” she said, “if I made Tommy a little bit scared, less sure of himself… It always worked in the old movies.”

We had reached the elevators. “Do you love him?” I asked.

Once again Lala put her hand on my arm. “Even in the dictionary, love means a lot of things, darling. But having nothing only means trouble.”

I got onto the elevator. By the third floor I couldn’t hear even her echo. By the top floor I had almost convinced myself that I had nothing in common with Lala, and that there were no similar sticks to get off of between C.K. Mackenzie and Tommy.

A drowsy security guard sat outside the suite. “Can’t come in here, ma’am,” he said. “This here area is not open to the public.”

I told him my name and purpose. He checked a clipboard and looked disappointed that I had passed muster. “Thought you were another gaper. People act like this is a set for
Unsolved Mysteries
.” His scowl made him look like a pink-skinned bulldog as he heaved himself out of his chair with a great sigh and turned the knob of the suite.

“Thanks.” I stepped in. I expected many things, but not a curvacious bit of a woman dressed entirely in black—hat, gloves, shoes, stockings, slacks—except for the flashes of brass on every one of the above garments and the yellow-gold hair cascading over her shoulders. Even her cane had a brass head and rivets all the way down its shaft.

Rivets, I thought. The bolted Mrs. Reese. Jesse’s widow. But something was wrong.

The widow Reese stood near the door in the suite’s foyer, pursing her red-gold mouth, tilting her head and listening intently to a stocky patrolman in uniform. He interrupted himself and looked me over.

“She’s the one,” the hall monitor said.

“Oh, yeah?” He looked disgusted.

“The last to know,” the woman in black said in a gravelly voice. She pressed one gloved hand to her ample bosom. “Like they always say. Isn’t that so, Holly?”

A loud, commiserating
tsk
came from a blaze of hot color across the entryway, and then a slow “he was—such a—son of”—words rolling out in a deep female voice—“a bitch.”

The widow sniffled into a black lacy handkerchief. I knew what was wrong. She’d bleached her hair overnight. From raven to brass. What a weird expression of grief. Or was it suspicious?

The patrolman looked at me with contempt. “What do you want?”

“My clothing and things.”

“You?”
The widow practically shouted it. “You’re the one he was shacked up here with?”

I shook my head. “I’m here for my toothbrush and—”

“They let you
free
?” Her voice sounded stone-washed and bruised.

The deep voice of the other woman, the pink one, joined in. “You have some nerve showing your face. Don’t you have any respect?”

“Listen, I’m not—this isn’t—” I glared at the policeman.

“My poor sister. Bad enough that son of a bitch humiliates her with his bimbos!” I wondered how she’d define herself, bandaged as she was in hot-pink spandex that barely coexisted with her carotene hair. “But to have his playmate—his
murderer
—”

I was almost flattered at being called a bimbo. I felt haggard and shabby in my oversized borrowed sweater and yesterday’s slacks, my too-tight loafers and my post-Mackenzie, post-Sasha, post-Georgette, post-Lala, post-Lucky funk.

“This here’s the
other
one was staying here,” the policeman said. “Needs her toothbrush and things.”

“What did you have planned for up here? Something really kinky with both you girls?” the hot-pink woman demanded. Her ensemble was also outlined in rivets. The bolted look was a fashion development I didn’t mind having missed.

“Didnja hear what he said? She isn’t the one who was here,” the widow told her sister. “I didn’t mean to infer. Imply. Suggest. I’m rattled, you know?” She put out her gloved hand. “I’m Poppy Reese,” she said solemnly. “That’s my sister Holly.”

I wondered if they had other botanically named siblings, if there were boy-children with plant names as well.

Then she turned to the patrolman. “We spent a lot of time here together, you know. It brings back too many…” She dabbed at her eyes, although there was no moisture for her black lace hanky to catch.

“Sorry, ma’am. We thought maybe you’d see something out of place, or wrong. You know.”

“My sister’s upset,” the woman in pink said. She lounged against the silk-covered wall and tapped one hot-pink shoe. “Her
husband
—her lying, cheating, no-good husband who’d already wasted half
their
money—was killed yesterday, in case you forgot. Her whole entire world has just collapsed.”

“We’re out of here,” Poppy Reese said.

The law nodded. “You’ll be home, then? In Haddonfield?”

Poppy shook her head. “My
sister’s
house. Holly Booker, up at the end of the boardwalk, in Ventnor. I gave you the address already.”

“Why should my sister be in her big house all alone? It’s too far away and too full of memories, am I right, Poppy?”

Poppy’s nod was woe itself.

“This way, we can walk the boards, come in here for a massage, a little workout. It’ll be good for her. Physical activity, a little pampering—it’s always good for a person.”

“She works here,” Poppy said. “In the spa.”

Holly worked here. And what was her relationship with the deceased? Could Jesse have happened to be around the bar because he was seeing Sis on the sly?

“Besides,” Holly said, “we haven’t seen each other for a while. Ever since her car went into the shop, like a year ago, she can’t get here, and that no-good husband of hers, you’d think he’d bring her? I picked her up this morning. I said, ‘You’re staying with me.’”

“It’s been in the shop two weeks,” Poppy corrected her. “Not a year. I drive a special car,” she said to the policeman. “Because of my…” She looked momentarily sad for real.

“Besides,” Holly said again, “she has her businesses to look after. Especially now that—”

“Business?” the cop asked.

Wait, I thought. Wait. This was all wrong. Poppy was in Atlantic City last night. Why didn’t she want her sister to know? Also, if she couldn’t drive herself, then with whom had she come, if not her husband? The suspicion that she’d been spying on Jesse, perhaps because of her sister, grew.

I’d have to talk with Mackenzie about this—but when? We were supposed to for once and finally talk about us, and who knew what would happen after that?

“Businesses,” Holly said. “My sister’s very talented. You’re looking at the next Liz Claiborne, so help me.”

Holly wasn’t behaving like my idea of a woman who’d been cheating with her sister’s husband. Or someone whose lover had just been offed. Or maybe she was. Maybe she was being overly solicitous, overly obvious about her solicitousness.

Holly patted her sister’s shoulder and winked at the cop, like a mother pushing her child forward for praise. Make the kid feel better, she seemed to be saying. “The store has three lines—Glitz for Gals. Studz—with a z—for Guys, Twinklz—with another z—for Tots. Three entire lines. Rivets are her personal fashion statement. You heard it first here.”

“I’m sorry.” The patrolman looked apologetic. “I don’t know a whole lot about fashion, so…”

“Well,” Holly said, “it isn’t exactly open yet.” She sounded a little testy, as if we were demeaning her sister by quibbling over inessentials—real store or figment, who cared?

“And now, look what happened. Talk about a setback,” the widow said. I found it an interesting way to categorize—or dismiss—her husband’s death. “You never know, do you?”

Poppy took a deep breath. “Still, life must go on.” And then, followed by her pink sibling, she left.

The patrolman stared at her afterimage. “Did you know she was Miss Nebraska or Kansas—someplace like that—awhile back?” he asked me. “They’re usually a lot taller. A real shame about her being lame now and all.” He kept staring at the space she’d vacated until her lingering spell finally broke. Then he nodded me in the general direction of the bedroom.

Once again, and probably for the last time, I admired the elegant serenity of the Eastern Suite. Only its name troubled me. East for me would be England. A room filled with Hepplewhite would be an Eastern Suite. Why had we adopted England’s egocentric and geographically backward labels, as if we were still their colony?

“Don’t touch anything except what you have to,” the cop said. I wondered why, at this point, it mattered. Everything must have been long since dusted, sprayed, photographed, documented, or removed. I decided he’d said it out of sheer spite. He wanted to make everything hard for me because he didn’t like me as much as he’d liked the widow Poppy. But then, I’d never been Miss Anything except Pepper.

At the bedroom door I gasped and put both my hands up to my mouth. Perhaps I’d unconsciously assumed that once everything was measured and noted, the room would be freshened up by a special postmortem chambermaid, but the room looked as if the murder were happening now, but for the absence of the victim.

One of the two beds was pulled apart, the bedding dangling onto the floor, pulled half off the mattress, but that wasn’t it.

It was the red-brown splat on the sheeting, the gory spread, the rusty mattress pad. It was where blood had arced and dripped in splatters across the once beautiful screen behind the bed, and onto the wall beyond it.

“Dear God.” I turned my head away, nauseous and on the verge of tears.

The detective said nothing, but I felt his eyes on my skin, studying me, as if my every word and action were important evidence.

I ducked my head, averted my eyes, and pulled my suitcase out of the closet.

“Make sure you only take your own things,” he said. “Let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary—you don’t have to check the pockets or anything.”

Because they already had. The idea made me even sicker. Had I left anything peculiar, unethical, or unworthy in my pockets? Was this like having an accident with ripped underwear?

Oh, God, my underwear. Surely they’d been through that, too, so it was
exactly
like that! I hoped nobody told my mother.

“But anything out of the ordinary,” he repeated.

Such as what? A ten-million-dollar check from Publishers Clearing House stapled to the hem of my green blouse? A komodo dragon on my blazer lapel? My jeans’ legs sewn together? What could possibly be out of the ordinary about my pathetic wardrobe, given that disarray and poor maintenance was the norm, and that they’d already examined every fiber of it, anyway?

I folded each piece carefully, wanting to impress the officer with my wholesome packing expertise. “Couldn’t somebody from the hotel do this?” I finally asked. “Bring a rack and hang everything up?”

He nodded. “Except you’d still have to say which is yours and which is hers, you know. This is just as efficient.”

Not for me. The process seemed voyeuristic and creepy. I tucked the sandals I’d optimistically packed for the beach into the edge of the suitcase, scooped up my underwear without checking it for imperfections or fingerprints, and retrieved my tennis shoes, remembering bitterly the peaceful solitary walks I’d also fantasized. “Is it all right if I change shoes?” I asked the detective. “These loafers are…my feet have been hurting since last night.”

I wanted him to smile, to ease up, but he didn’t oblige me. He shook his head, somehow conveying that I was yet another Cinderella wannabe, squeezing my feet into tiny sizes. Or was that my own crabbed conscience speaking? In any case, the man said my footwear didn’t make any difference to him.

I didn’t think I should muss the good bed, certainly didn’t want to go near the gory bed and didn’t want to ask Officer Smiles’s permission to sit on any other surface, so I accomplished the great shoe switch on the floor. The back throb I’d felt earlier with Lucky upped its voltage. I switched positions along with shoes and convinced myself that I did not have anything as trite and boring as a back problem. What I did have were blisters on both my heels and, when I stood up, a very sharp and extremely painful pressure on a toe.

“You done, then?” the policeman asked.

“No. Sorry.” I sat back down. “A pebble,” I said by way of explanation as I pulled the shoe off and shook it. He yawned and turned away.

A former pebble, I should have said. Once upon a time, when it lodged itself in the belly of an oyster. Now, a pearl earring with a sharp post that had been drilling through my toe. I shook the shoe some more, to see if the clasp was in there as well, but it was not.

I bent over the earring on the carpet, afraid to touch it. Surely it had prints on it. I didn’t know good pearls from paste, but this one had a nice sheen and a quietly elegant setting that suggested it had not been a Kmart special.

I stood up straight and rubbed my back. I didn’t own anything like that earring, and Sasha wouldn’t. It was too understated, too unobtrusive. With her wild curly mane, she felt there was no point to earrings unless they were humungous enough to swing free and shine.

“Excuse me,” I told the cop, whose back was to me as he stared out the window. I was glad he didn’t seem literate enough to read my mind and find me thinking of the expression pearls before swine.

“Yeah?” he asked, back still to me.