Mummers' Curse (6 page)

“Surely somebody saw it happen, but they didn’t know they were seeing it happen.”

“If a person sees a crime in a forest, but doesn’t know he’s seeing a crime, did he see it?”

“What is the sound of one homicide detective being snotty?”

He yawned, and I felt a twinge of compassion. He was tired, disappointed, and frustrated at the prospect of a difficult, if not impossible, investigation.

He sank into the downy softness of our most recent extravagance, a sofa made of leather so butter-soft and palely glowing, I was sure it had been the hide of something gentle and mythical, most likely a unicorn. I hoped it had died of old age.

“Ahhh,” he said. “Quiet at last. It hurts to listen to that many people. I must have gotten five hundred names. Not that anybody had much to say, except how horrible this all was and that they didn’t know what the hell happened and they were royally freaked out.”

“I met somebody named Quentin who’d love listening to their traumas.”

He rolled his eyes. “You going to tell me his history, too?”

“Hers. And the only part I know is that her parents really, really wanted a boy.”

“Wouldn’t anyone’s?”

I sat down next to him, the better to throttle him. “You’re so easy,” he murmured. “Any time I want to see a cute knee jerk…”

“I was thinking…”

He sat up straighter. His hair seemed to uncurl and go on alert. Despite his avowed preference for “smart women,” they sometimes frightened him. Or at least I did.

“It’s a brand new year,” he said. “Surely Philadelphians have more than Mummers by way of tradition. Don’t you folk make resolutions? How about you make a serious one to—”

“Stop thinking?”

“Stop thinkin’ about what you’re thinkin’ about, which is what I’m supposed to think about an’ concentrate instead on thinkin’ about what you’re supposed to be thinkin’ about.”

“If I could follow you, I’d try. But all I meant was that I know some of the people involved, so could I help you?”

“Sure. I’d like you to tell me whatever you know, just the way you did about Jimmy Pat. But if you mean could we job-share, then the answer is no. Adamantly. Definitely. Absolutely.”

“Get off the fence, Mackenzie. You want me as a partner or not?”

He had the grace to grin.

“So, then,” I said. “Don’t you think I could—”

“I think you, or somebody, could make dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“You remember. Food. The stuff that gets rid of that yawningly empty sensation. This somebody doesn’t have the energy to cook tonight, and don’ know who’s open for takeout on New Year’s Day.”

Given that the cat was unlikely to whip up a repast, that left me as the somebody. I am a moody cook. I have my moments, but only when I feel like it. Mostly, I don’t.

The grinding dailiness of food preparation makes me feel trapped in an alimentary canal. I can hear the hollow boom of empty stomachs, the gurgle-song of digestive juices. Buy ingredients, they warble; prepare them, serve them to me in a new form, clean up from the serving and the cooking, and then—well, I don’t want to think about the finale of the roundelay. And if you listen to it, obey it, do it—then you have to start all over again. Couldn’t we take care of all that and save a whole lot of time if we were fitted with long-term batteries instead? I think Mother Nature was on the phone when the idea of sustenance came by for review, and she waved it on.

Besides, even though we now shared the loft, the kitchen was still, unmistakably, Mackenzie’s. He tried to be nonchalant about it, but I could feel him watching that I didn’t scratch the tin lining of his beloved copper pots, and that I left the counters sterilized in case we’d have to perform brain surgery later in the evening. I like to slop things around, feel industrious through an abundance of clutter, then do a decent cleanup. Life is too short to polish a copper pot, which, just like the rest of the food cycle, needs constant redoing.

Luckily, we still had the chicken-vegetable-noodle soup, most of a good crusty loaf of bread, and a bottle of Pinot Noir. On my less inspired days, whatever I cooked seemed like leftovers—even when we’d never had the food a first time.

“You have to remember,” Mackenzie said from the sofa, “that somewhere is a person who shot a man in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. A person, therefore, who isn’t easily intimidated. Cold-blooded. Not a person to frighten by pushing on him or meddlin’.”

“Meddling! You make me sound like a—”

“Meddler.”

“I wanted to help. That was all.”

“Does it have anythin’ to do with your friend’s being involved?”

“Why are you picking on him? You said everybody was a suspect. You don’t know anything except that Vincent was hard to find today. Which argues in his favor, anyway.”

Mackenzie nodded. “He’s a suspect, then, is that okay?”

“Why? You sought him out because he teaches at my school and you knew his name. Teaching with me isn’t a crime, but you’re making it one. That’s why I feel involved.”

“Far as I can see, you always feel involved. Have you ever considered puttin’ this quirk to use?”

“You called it meddling.”

“Not that way. You could turn a profit by labeling it a problem, a societal ill. You know the drill. Females who love crime too much. Homicide addiction. Women who snoop too much. Write a book, go on talk shows. Confessions of a crime junkie.”

He pronounced it as
crahm
, but a slur, slurred, doesn’t sound less offensive.

“A twelve-step program,” he went on with low-grade Southern glee, “startin’ with step one: one crime at a time. You’ll make a fortune.”

“Never mind. It was an offer, nothing more. End of topic.” I said it mildly, actually meant it, although I was still worried about Vincent Devaney’s whereabouts and/or why Mackenzie was suspicious of him. But in the meantime, peace was restored in our little household. After awhile, we even remembered that there were things to do together that were more fun than discussing crime and punishment.

Later, Mackenzie napped. He had to go back to work at midnight. I lay on the bed, watching the digital adjustments of our Doomsday clock. We’d gone to a Boxing Day party after Christmas. Each invitee brought his worst gift for a blind swap.

I wound up stuck with the Doomsday clock, and nobody else tried to trade for it. No wonder. And no wonder somebody had gladly given it up.

It sat on the dresser, either a grisly piece of humor or just plain grisly. On a black marble slab, a lighted panel said:

YOU HAVE

359,160 HOURS

15 MINUTES

LEFT IN YOUR LIFE. ENJOY THEM.

THE TIME IS NOW: 10:47 P.M.

Enjoy them, indeed. Who had thought the device up? What kind of person bought it as a Christmas gift—and for whom, with what motive? As I watched, my remaining time dwindled, second by second. Three hundred and fifty-nine thousand hours didn’t seem enough, particularly when I could watch them diminish. I worried whether the clock maker had accounted for the leap years in my future, for daylight saving time, for medical breakthroughs and random violence. Did this mean it didn’t matter if I exercised or started smoking again or rode a motorcycle without a helmet or jaywalked?

When the telephone rang, I realized that I had dozed off. The Doomsday clock said 1:05 a.m. Also that I had two hours and eighteen minutes less to live.

The caller brusquely asked if Mackenzie was there and told me that if so, I should immediately wake him.

We’d overslept. The alarm on the real clock, hastily and wrongly set for a.m. instead of p.m., had remained silent. Actually, only one of us had overslept since I’d never intended either to go to sleep at eleven or to be up at midnight.

Mackenzie looked so exhausted, I felt cruel for waking him. It didn’t seem fair that baddies got to do their thing whenever they so pleased, and goodies had to play the game according to the criminal’s timetable.

I saw him off, then shuffled back to bed, intending to sleep straight through the last day of my vacation, even if it meant missing hours, minutes, and seconds of remaining life.

It had taken me awhile to get used to the wide-open expanses of the loft after years in my historic but constricted house. When I first moved in here, I felt stranded in a wilderness. Nothing above the high ceilings but roofing, nothing below but other spaces, too often silent, and an art gallery that was closed at night. For a month, I half hoped the walls would close in, like something out of Poe, but now, I was accustomed to a skylit ceiling and plaster and brick horizons I could barely see at night. The dangerous expanse had become breathing space.

Macavity, who was supposed to be the skittish one, had taken ten minutes max to call the place home.

All of which was to say that both the cat and I were soundly asleep when the door to the loft opened.

I wouldn’t have noticed, it was done so quietly, except that Macavity did notice and pounded over my hip and chest en route to his under-bed hiding spot. It’s amazing how much a cat makes itself weigh when it’s stomping you. “Detour, you inconsiderate beast,” I groaned. The cat spoke back.

“Since you’re already up…”

I screamed. And lost a huge number of seconds and minutes of the potential joy I had left.

“Din’ mean to startle you, thought I heard you—”

“For God’s sake! How could you not think you’d scare me? What are you doing here? You just left! Why didn’t you knock, or make noise—what are you
doing
here?”

“Workin’. And now that you really are up…”

I was. Definitely. All systems jump-started even though, squint as I might, I couldn’t see a hint of daylight through the windows, or even through the skylight. “It isn’t tomorrow yet.”

“It’s four forty-six a.m.,” he said in a bright voice that assumed I was lucky he hadn’t let me sleep past this fabulous hour. “I’ll make coffee,” he added, and he relocated to do so.

There followed an inordinate amount of grinding, tamping, clattering, and cabinet-slamming for so minor a task.

I dragged my bod out of bed, into the arctic of a brick-walled expanse whose heat had been turned down for the night. I insulated my feet with a pair of Mackenzie’s ski socks and pulled a hooded sweatshirt on top of the oversized T-shirt I wore as a nightie. I did not look like an ad for eternal womanhood, but I was warmer. “What is it?” I muttered. I caught the first fragrant fumes of brewing coffee. “What’s going on?”

“I missed you, so I made a detour. Nice that we live so close to headquarters.”

“I’m always glad to see youuuuu….” The
you
turned into a gigantic yawn. When it was finished, I continued. “Only, sometimes more than other times. I thought you were working.”

“I am.” Enough had dripped into the pot to pour us each a cup. I felt more nervous with each nuance of coffee-serving minutiae, as if Mackenzie were inventing a ceremony for an onerous event. Something was amiss if the man visited this way at this hour while on a new homicide case.

He rummaged around until he found leftover bagels, then he sliced two and put them in the toaster oven.

“You’re gonna get a call,” he said, “later, from the department. Billy Obenhauser, okay? Wants to talk about your buddy. Devaney.”

“Why?” I knew that business that Mackenzie had said earlier, but I didn’t know
why
. “As a character witness?”

“As an alibi.” He sat down across from me and sipped his coffee, never taking his eyes off my face. I hoped the attentiveness was love, not surveillance.

“Whose?” I asked. “For what?” Those weren’t over-bright questions, but I was sleep deprived and even if I hadn’t been, the idea still wouldn’t have made ready sense.

“Vincent Devaney’s. He insists—not to me, to Billy, who was questioning him—that he was not around for the probable time Jimmy Pat was shot. Says he was with a teacher from his school. Namely, you.”

“But I was with you!”

“I know that and you know that. Devaney seems the only one who doesn’t know that. Of course, there are gaps like when you and Karen left. I can’t vouch for then.” He waited.

So that hadn’t been love light in his eyes but the gleam of professional observation. “What are you intimating? We stood in line for the Porta Potti, and then we stopped at a pretzel vendor’s.”

“And the other time was when I went to get us hot dogs.”

“What are you saying, C.K.?”

“Just the facts, ma’am. The thing is, Vincent doesn’t appear to have known that we were parade-viewing together. Or that I’m a cop. You never told him about me?” He seemed to feel slighted.

“About you? Told him what? I notified him of your existence. Of our relationship. And probably about what you do for a living.” We’d talked lots in the months during which I was supposedly writing my article.

The article. I felt an avaricious and shameful flash. Would it be more salable because of the murder?

I had to think about precisely what I had told Vincent. Before school ended for winter break, I’d mentioned that I was taking my niece to the parade. I had no idea whether I’d said Mackenzie would be there, too. Probably not, because I couldn’t have known for sure two weeks ago. The man’s schedule is not exactly predictable. So it could have appeared I’d be at the parade with Karen and no one else. The implications of this made me sad. “He’s not a killer,” I said.

“Nobody is. Everybody is, pushed enough.”

“They were like brothers.”

“So were Cain and Abel.”

“Come on. Best friends, then.”

“Fighting over everything,” he said, surprising me. “Pretty heatedly about who would be the next club Captain.”

I waved that away. “Good-natured rivalry, that’s all.”

“Even about who would wear the frame suit. And Jimmy Pat had a habit of always winning their contests. This could have been one contest too many.”

“You’re pushing too hard. Not Vincent.”

Mackenzie raised an eyebrow.

“That’s all I know and now I’ve said it. So why does somebody else have to question me?”

“Ethical gray area if I question you about your whereabouts. I was part of them, remember?”