Mummers' Curse (13 page)

She shook her head.

“An open case? I mean, should the police be told this information?”

She raised her eyebrows. “The police don’t pay a cent.”

“But legally, if you have information…”

“So what you’re saying is you don’t do what they call investigative reporting. Too bad. What do you write about?”

I could have said gardening or fly-fishing or anything, except the only thing which came to my limited, somewhat frozen mind was the truth. “I’m doing a piece on the Mummers.”

“The Mum—” She squinted so hard a crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Wait a minute—you’re
that
writer!”

I had achieved literary fame without writing, let alone publishing, a word. Amazing.

“You work with Vinny Devaney, don’t you?”

I didn’t say a word or move a muscle.

“You’re her, aren’t you? I can’t believe it.”

“Why? How did you hear about me?”

“I was told you’re snooping around about Jimmy Pat’s murder for an article that’s going to be bad for us—”

“Us?”

She shrugged. “Shooters. Us.”

“You’re a Mummer?”

“Not officially. But I practically live on Two Street, and I love it, the fun, the guys, the people. It’s sure better than this.” She opened her arms to indicate the store.

A Mummer groupie, as I live and breathe. And completely understandable, given her gray daily surroundings.

“These are good people, my people,” she said, “and they like their privacy, keep it within friends, and nobody wants you airing our dirty laundry.”

“I’m not. I’m probably not even going to write the article, and it never had anything to do with dirty laundry, whatever you’re referring to. It wasn’t going to be bad for the Mummers, it was going to be good publicity. That kind of thing.”

“Like Mummers need publicity,” she said. “The whole world knows about them.” She smiled for the first time, and seemed to reappraise me. Then she lifted a shoulder and tilted her head. “But why should I listen to what a Grassi tells me?”

“They—” I waved at the now-empty storefront. “That’s what they came here for? To tell you about me?”

She shook her head. “We had things to say. They added a warning about you for free. A bonus. But hell, why should I listen? That family hates me because…they do. They’re jealous of me, is all. Even now. I’ll say what I want to who I want.”

Her grammar wasn’t perfect, but the blue of her eyes was, and she had a spark that ignited her features and made her more interesting than Dolores, and I could understand Jimmy Pat’s defection. If indeed such had happened. I also could understand why the Grassis would fear her.

What I couldn’t understand was why they’d go out of their way to warn her against me. Or if, as she’d said, it had been chitchat, something dropped in passing…then, what was it they’d had to talk to this girl about?

“I could tell you something for your article,” Emily said.

“The story you mentioned?”

She shook her head. “That one’s for sale. This is for the Mummers article. About Jimmy Pat. Free of charge.”

“My article isn’t about him, it’s—”

“He wasn’t going to marry her. That’s what Stephen Grassi didn’t want me to tell you. They wouldn’t want you to know that, being as they’re big on their reputation. Appearances. They get what they want, you know? The Grassis act like they own us all, living up there in the Estates, having money and respect, but nobody owns me.”

“Hold on,” I said quietly. “Jimmy Pat was supposed to marry Dolores in two weeks.”

She shrugged. “Supposed to doesn’t mean going to. And she knew it. He told me he told her. So she didn’t say? She’s still pretending like she’s getting ready for a wedding?”

“Well, given that Jimmy Pat’s dead, she’s not—”

“She’s not telling the truth, is she? That it was off.”

“Not that I know of. What’s it…what happened?”

Emily looked at me with her dark-lashed pale eyes. “He was in love with me.” She shrugged. “What can I say? He finally realized what a mistake he was making. A man can be dazzled by an important family like the Grassis. And those brothers probably strong-armed him.”

“It was really off?”

She nodded vigorously. “She knew, too, but she didn’t tell anybody. Not even her mother, who kept on with the preparations. All Dolores cares about is saving face. She knew a week ago. He was going to marry me once a decent amount of time passed and the gifts were returned and all. Didn’t want to be rude and marry me the weekend he was supposed to marry her. Maybe in spring, we thought. I always wanted to be a June bride. I wanted the serenade, too.”

The serenade was a warm-weather Mummer tradition, a private concert outside the house of the bride-to-be. I had notes about it at home. I thought about the warm weather, a season away.

Emily’s face crumpled. “Now, of course…” She shook her head and wiped at her nose.

“So sad,” I said. And so unlike what the gossips had suggested. A man doesn’t delay his wedding six months to someone he
has
to marry. And Emily, despite her dreams of romantic serenades wouldn’t wait that long, either. “What a shame for you,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what made Jimmy Pat suddenly realize it was you he wanted to marry?”

Her peachy skin iced over and her eyes became glacial.

“It’s so romantic,” I said. “And sad. Tragic, even, like those old myths. Tristan and Isolde…”

“Who the hell are they?’

“Like Romeo and Juliet, you know?”

Her expression softened. “Except we weren’t kids, and we always loved each other and our families didn’t have problems with each other. See, I remember what I was taught. Jimmy and me, we dated after we were out of school, then I don’t know what happened. We were immature. Dolores got Jimmy Pat on the rebound, that’s all it was. Her family knew him from the Fancy Club, so they were happy about it, and they planned that wedding from day one. I don’t blame them. Dolores has a bad attitude, a bad rep. Always dumping men, changing her mind. She’s a spoiled brat and always was. Her family calls her Princess and they mean it. Baby Princess gets whatever she wants from Mommy and Daddy and her four big brothers. But people who aren’t Grassis get tired of it, you know? It gets old real fast. A man’d be crazy to plan a life with her, and rich as she is, Jimmy Pat was her one chance—if they moved fast, while he was still blinded by the fancy Grassis.”

I wondered how she knew so much about the Grassis, who seemed to live in a different world and at a different social level than Emily did. Perhaps the link was the Mummers. “This is irrelevant, but is your family also involved with a club?”

“Your article, huh? Always doing the research, aren’t you?” She shook her head. “I’m it for family, except my dad. He was in a String Band. Played the glockenspiel, but he’s been crippled a long time. His old club’d let him ride in the banner car, or the repair car, but he says if he can’t march on his own two feet, he isn’t going anywhere. Cuts off his nose to spite his face, I say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So, about Jimmy Pat, I ran into him maybe two weeks ago, and that pretty much was it. It can be like that, you know. You suddenly realize, and then, your fate is set.”

Two weeks ago. And he supposedly told Dolores their wedding was off a week later. It necessitated rewriting the laws of biology to begin a pregnancy, get it verified, and rupture a prior engagement within seven days. Either Emily was fabricating a story, or the gossip was dead wrong about a shotgun wedding.

“Quite a story,” I said. “You were right.”

“Wait a minute—are you talking about this, or the other story?”

“I thought, since you said your story had to do with a murder, and Jimmy Pat was murdered, I thought maybe this turned out to be the story.”

“This was a story. But what happened to Jimmy…if I knew that…” She squeezed her lips together so tightly that no color showed in them. “I’d get the son of a bitch who did it, and I’d cut out his heart.”

I believed her. “I…have to think about the other story, then,” I said.

“You’re not interested? Do you know, maybe, if a person can call up one of those TV shows, like
Unsolved Mysteries
? Do they pay? Do you need to know somebody?”

“I could try to find out.”

“Never mind.” I could almost see her vivid coloring fade into the overall gray of the store.

“If you give me a clue as to what murder this is about, maybe I could—”

“Rip me off. No thanks. It’s what I have, and I’m not giving it away. So…look around. That’s why you’re here, right?”

There wasn’t much to see. The supplies looked old and tired. “This is it,” I said. I bought the unnecessary three-by-fives and the pen with green ink.

She looked at me intently as I opened the door. I paused, thinking she was on the verge of changing her mind, of unburdening herself of the too-big story that weighed heavily on her.

Then her father’s voice boomed out of the dark back room, and looking as if all possibilities had just been erased, she turned around and answered his summons.

Eight

IT WAS GOOD TO BE HOME WHERE THE COMPLICATIONS OF MY RELATIONSHIP with Mackenzie, endless though they often seemed, felt simple and clean-edged in comparison to the love-murk I’d waded through. Nobody out there was fully or adequately attached; nobody appeared to be cleaving completely unto, or forsaking all others. If I probed more, I’d probably find out that Barbs Devaney had a guy on the side and that Dolores also had a spare somewhere.

The phone rang at dusk. “Hi,” Mackenzie greeted me. “Gonna take a food break soon, me and Billy.”

“As in Obenhauser?”

“Uh-huh. Yes. He says ‘hi,’ too.”

Very cordial for a man I didn’t know, but I got the message.

“He’s been back awhile, too, and he’s ready for a break.”

Translation: Billy had been to see Vincent.

“Been a long day.”

That was the unsimple truth, not code for anything. Given that Mackenzie’s dawn had been one a.m., he’d been doing whatever he does for seventeen hours now.

“How does pizza sound?” he asked. “Sausage and mushrooms. And how did your day go?”

“Middling. You want a rundown before Billy’s with you?”

“Shoot.”

“Okay, understanding that some of what I was told might be delusional, here goes: Vincent used to be—might still be—in love with Dolores Grassi, who was engaged to the dead man. Vincent’s wife, Barbs, is a jealous woman. Dolores Grassi’s engagement to Jimmy Pat might actually have been cancelled a week ago, even though she’s not admitting it. Don’t try Pepper Pot soup. Some person named Molly, a gossip, thinks Emily Semow, the other woman in the Dolores-Jimmy Pat triangle, is pregnant, and that’s why he was about to switch brides, but Emily says they only just met up again two weeks ago and weren’t going to get married until June. She also has a murder she wants to sell me. I mean, she doesn’t want to sell me a murder, she wants me to pay her for what she knows about one so I could write about it. On the other hand, she and Dolores and Dolores’s brothers are paranoid about what I might write about them.”

“What’s all this about writing?”

“Give me a break. They heard I was a journalist.”

Mackenzie, my conscience, did not say “so did I,” for which I was grateful. “So,” he said instead, “that’s how you define a middlin’ day?”

I wasn’t sure if that was praise for all I’d found out or a polite expression of tedium, or a kind of macho joshing to let Billy O. know that Mackenzie and I never had talks of any substance. Whatever.

*

The telephone rang again after the constables and pizzas had arrived. We’d been doing silent munching, since Mackenzie wasn’t about to talk about the case, either his findings or lack thereof or mine, with the corpulent, good-natured, shrewd-looking Billy there.

The official line, or an overview of it, hadn’t taken long—my whereabouts during the parade, my not having seen Vincent during that time, etcetera. I’d promised to go to headquarters and make a formal statement along those lines, and then we’d run out of chitchat and concentrated on pizza. It was an exceedingly dull dinner party, or I wouldn’t have answered the phone.

I shouldn’t have, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that my caller was once again Renata Field. “We had an agreement, Renata.” I kept my voice calm, although I felt anything but. The girl was invading my home and my life, and I felt her as a physical presence. Nonetheless, I didn’t want Billy noticing my murderous streak. “
Badgering
doesn’t help anything.”

No, she insisted. This wasn’t badgering. This was one last attempt to break through my thick-headed lack of comprehension about how a desperate person, such as she, had to bend the rules.

Because of her, I was now the desperate person and she was still a lazy, immature wretch. I had so few rules—she had no right to bend a single one of them.

But there was a new twist to her desperation. Unless I gave her a decent grade, she said in a quavering voice, her parents were pulling her out of Philly Prep. She thought maybe she’d kill herself or at least just die if that happened.

I wondered what my principal would do if I cost him a tuition. In a conflict between ethics and money, I didn’t have to guess which side Havermeyer would favor.

“I made a mistake,” Renata said in a vibrato. “I admit that, even though you never let me explain why. You never gave me a fair chance to defend myself.”

“That exam
was
a chance, and you know it. Besides, you admitted cheating.” On a take-home exam. She could have read the book instead. Or, at least, if she felt driven to cheat, she shouldn’t have produced a word-for-word duplication of another student’s essay. For stupidity alone she deserved to fail.

The other girl’s record was exemplary. She’d be able to drop her lowest grade. Everybody could. She’d be fine. Renata, whose only earned grade was an F, wouldn’t.

“There were
reasons
,” Renata said. “I had problems.” Renata considered life an emotional difficulty, a personal affront visited upon poor, unlucky her and her alone.

“I was
desperate
.” She must have realized she had already used that line of defense in this conversation. “I was…” She paused, trying to find a synonym for desperation, but because she’d never paid attention during lessons in vocabulary building, she lapsed into silence.