Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (9 page)

She
looked to her right for any sign of her sisters coming up the path and to her left for anyone looking out a window and back at the porch for anyone who might have heard the ruckus and come out of the house. Seeing nobody, she stood up and walked around the hedge to her father, who she found lying on his back. His pleasant face didn’t look so pleasant anymore, but not as bad as she’d expected. After seeing all the blows he’d taken and seeing his blood fly like bad stuff from a bug sprayer, she didn’t expect him to have any face at all. She knelt next to him for a closer look. His mouth was open in a weird way. It kind of reminded her of a squirrel that had been run over by a car: it might look like a squirrel, with all the little squirrel details, but squirrels aren’t supposed to be pasted to the street, flat as a pancake. That’s what his mouth looked like, flat, pasted to his face, smashed open, with all the teeth lined up in a neat row, except for the ones on the right side, both top and bottom, which were bloody and folded into the mouth. The right side of his face looked bad in general, crushed, oozing, a black pulpy mess. She really couldn’t make out much of his right eye in this jumble, but the left one looked remarkably good and was peacefully closed.

He didn’t seem to be breathing.
She poked him in the shoulder with her finger. His left eyelid twitched. She poked him again. The eyelid opened and the eyeball swiveled in its socket and looked at her. His chest heaved and she heard grunting sounds, like the sound of someone about to throw up. The heaving grew bigger and the grunting became louder until a gagging cough broke through and sent a wave of blood splashing from his mouth onto his face and neck. He sucked in a monstrous, gurgling breath, coughed it right back out, sucked in another one, and coughed it back out as well. By the third try, it sounded more like drowning than breathing. His tongue moved strangely in and out and all around, like it didn’t recognize the place that used to be his mouth, swishing out pools of blood each time it swept from one side to the other. But still the gurgling continued, and then the grunting and heaving too. His eye bulged, his neck swelled, and he gagged out the blood all over again.

After this,
as he desperately gulped air into his mutilated face, he also tried to talk, or so it seemed. In between gasps he pushed out thick, sticky sounds, which might’ve been words or, perhaps, nothing at all. Maybe the word “help.” Or maybe “hurry.” Or “hospital.” She tried to figure it out but didn’t have much luck.

And then it came to her.
She’d seen the boy’s picture in the newspaper, holding a trophy, smiling. Bet he didn’t have much of a smile now, thought Dorthea. No siree. Probably still crying like a baby, scared, like he’d been caught red handed…like she’d caught him red handed. Her concentration then got interrupted when her father’s left arm started patting at the ground and at her leg and then her arm, which it latched onto. He squeezed tight and pulled her close to his face. Drops of blood popped from his mouth onto his chin as he forced out some words that Dorthea still didn’t understand. She ripped her arm free and leaned back.

She knew th
e boy’s name too, both first and last. Wasn’t that interesting? She knew the name of the boy who looked like he’d been caught in the act of murder. He’d done it. All the way. And he knew it. His eyes said it. His body said it. His sobbing said it. But most of all, her father’s dead body said it—even though it wasn’t quite dead just yet. That rich boy had committed murder and nobody in the world knew about it except little old Dorthea Railer.

She reached into
the overall pocket on her father’s chest and took out the wadded up hanky.

“I’m gonna make that boy pay
, father,” she said as she leaned over and looked at him.

He gasped. She dabbed with the hanky at the blood on his forehead.

“But he’s not gonna pay you, ‘cause that wouldn’t do no good at all.”

She dabbed with the hanky at the blood on his chin.

“He’s gonna pay me.”

She
wound up the hanky into a tight ball.

“And you’re gonna
be proud of me.”

She
forcefully shoved the hanky deep into his gaping mouth. His left hand lurched skyward. She jumped onto his chest, grabbed his arms, and pinned them behind his head. His head rolled from side to side for a few seconds and then stopped. He stared at her. She stared at him.

“
I’m gonna do what you told me father. I’m gonna take the things that come my way. And today’s the day I gotta start—otherwise I won’t never do it. I know you understand.”

Then the heav
ing and grunting started again, but this time she didn’t just see and hear the spasms, she also felt them as she straddled her father’s chest. The first one didn’t do much, but then they grew stronger and louder until it felt like a ride on a rocking horse. When the last wave hit and the blood couldn’t escape from his blocked mouth, his head and shoulders jerked instead. She stayed in the saddle and kept an eye on his face, which now looked like a bulging bag of blood that might pop at any second. Then things became quiet. She still felt some heaving in his chest and saw throbbing in his neck, but it was very faint and seemed to be going away. Finally everything stopped altogether, no sound, no movement. She let go of his arms, pulled the hanky from his mouth, and dropped it onto the grass next to his head. He was dead.

She hadn’t done anything wrong, she told herself.
The man had been as good as dead, anyone could’ve seen that. She’d moved the hands of the clock up a few minutes, that’s all. And really, it had been the kind thing to do, seeing how he’d been suffering. That’s what it had been, an act of kindness.

She slid
to the grass next to her father’s body, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. And when she opened her eyes a few seconds later, what did she see but a bright orange sunburst shining down from the heavens above. Specifically, she saw the carved sunburst on Sunny Slope Manor’s gable. It was a sign. She had proven herself worthy and now had the blessing to prove it.

S
he stood up, took a deep breath, and screamed bloody murder.

Prospect Park instantly became reacquainted with Baby Dorthea. Of course she wasn’t a baby any longer. Or innocent like a baby either. In fact, it seemed the little tyke had grown up to be a murderer. And in the stifling Indian summer of 1932, she arrived at just the perfect time; few things, it seemed, refresh a sweltering population better than gossip about a cold-blooded murderer, especially a homegrown one.

The good people
eagerly devoured details of the crime from their afternoon newspapers and then chewed on them some more as they sat on their front porches in the cool of the evening. In the morning, they went shopping early to beat the heat, picking up fresh bread and fresh tittle-tattle from the baker, which they took across the street to the beauty parlor and shared with the lady in the chair on the left and then again with the lady on the right. On the way home, they stopped at the butcher for a Sunday roast and a pound of blather. In the business office, at the barbershop, and on the golf course, the manly scuttlebutt flowed as well, just more slowly, escorted by solemn nods and sorrowful frowns. Otherwise it seemed too much like gossip, which men didn’t do.

The police
didn’t come out and say that Dorthea knocked off her old man but everyone else did. How could it be otherwise? She’d had blood on her hands, blood on her dress, and admittedly had been the last person to see him alive. And who else on the hill cared to waste their time murdering Jeb Railer? No one, that’s who, except another Railer who happened to be on the hill with him. Two guttersnipes, one battered and dead, the other blood-stained and alive, case closed, string her up.

But not
too fast, because the good people still wanted to talk about it, sometimes politely, in polite company, and sometimes whispered confidentially to those who didn’t easily blush. Dorthea might’ve been only sixteen, but she was a looker. It didn’t take Scotland Yard to know that much. And while sordid details of the sexual variety hadn’t been found floating on the surface, speculating about what might be found just below the surface proved to be pleasantly entertaining. Maybe her mesmerizing slate-gray eyes had opened doors that dear old dad wanted closed. Maybe the brassy little thing had decided to throw off the ratty clothes and the rotten name and make hay with her spotless white complexion and coal black hair. And when dad got in the way, she clubbed him to death. Or had her lover do it. No! A lover you say? On the hill? It couldn’t be! Could it?

The murder weapon, which had been found practically at her feet, also became a favorite topic of conversation.
Sure, the old whiskey runner got knocked off, but he put his last drops of blood to good use, capturing the murderer’s fingerprints on the gooey club and then hardening them into an incriminating scarlet record. They said that the club prominently displayed the prints of every one of the killer’s fingers.

But they didn’t belong to Dorthea.
And Judith and Abigail, daughters of a duchess, confirmed her story that she’d been with them almost up to the time she started screaming. Eventually, these details seemed to convince the police of Dorthea’s innocence, but not anyone else. Not that the good people didn’t have a high regard for fingerprints and alibis and evidence. They just had a higher regard for speculation and conjecture and rumor, especially when it involved a juicy tomato like Dorthea Railer.

So the police and the district attorney
sat on their hands and did nothing. But who really cared? It had never been a crime that cried out for that kind of justice. A rabble-rousing drunkard had been killed. Sad, but not exactly a tragic loss for the community. From day one it had been more about entertainment than indignation, more about the court of public opinion than the court of law. And that high court didn’t need an arrest to render its verdict. Dorthea was guilty. Guilty of murder. If not that, then guilty of probably being guilty. Most certainly guilty of looking guilty. Case closed.

Eventually the Indian summer turned to autumn, the hot days began to cool, and so did the fad of
Jeb Railer’s demise. The red hot piece of coal cooled down to a white powder that blew away in the November breeze. The newspaper articles disappeared, the gossipers found fresher bones to chew on, and the police stopped pretending to care. No lasting damage had been done to Prospect Park’s sterling reputation, and the citizens didn’t feel violated by the violence in their own backyard. In that sense it had been the perfect crime; it had all the titillation, all the gore, all the unsavory characters, and none of the stain. Even the Railers had gotten something out of the deal: a booster shot to their notorious reputation. And now it was time for them to disappear. Time for Dorthea to disappear. Forever. No hard feelings. No sense begrudging the leper as long as she stayed where she belonged.

But what about
retribution? What about payment for the crime? Well the great thing about the court of public opinion is that the punishment starts immediately, before all the facts have been laid out and before a verdict has been rendered. In that regard, guilt or innocence doesn’t matter; the hapless defendant pays either way. In a swift and uncomplicated pronouncement, they are sentenced to disgrace, lost friendship, dashed expectations, and open ridicule, all of which might be lumped together and simply called a fall from grace. Unfortunately, this amounted to less than a slap on the wrist for Dorthea because she had no grace from which to fall. She’d been a wretch before the scandal and continued being a wretch after it. Oh well. Maybe it was all for the best. Punishing a wretch didn’t hold much excitement anyway. Not like punishing the high and mighty, such as the daughter of a duchess. Now that would be worth seeing.

~~~

Seven years later, in 1939, one of the high and mighty suffered such a punishment when she ran off and married the son of a butcher. That’s right, dumbbell Abbey, Dorthea’s former sister, ran away with a smooth-talker named John Evans who worked for his father hauling carcasses and hosing down entrails. He also delivered paper-wrapped meat, which had probably been the big attraction for Abbey: he knocked on the door; she answered; he gave her a rump roast and a cow’s tongue; she fell in love. The stupid little mouse. The world had been served up on a silver platter, and she threw it away on the first oaf who gave her the time of day. Now she’d live the rest of her life with a clod who brought home forty dollars a week and the foul smell of intestines. Dorthea howled with laughter when she heard the story.

But
then, a year later, it got even better when Mr. and Mrs. Evans came back to town—with a baby! A baby who looked six months old if she looked a day! A simple calculation made it quite clear that dumb little Abbey had taken more than a cow’s tongue from the delivery man, and that’s why she’d left town with a one way ticket in her purse. As for the duchess, she didn’t seem to have room for the newlyweds in her twenty room mansion, so she bought them a little house down the hill next to the library. Not a starter mansion just above the base of the hill. Not a presentable colonial revival just below it. A three bedroom two bath in the flatlands on a block where grocers and haberdashers lived. Goodbye Toomington Hall. Hello little bungalow. Goodbye Lady Abigail, daughter of a duke. Hello Mrs. John Evans, wife of a sausage stuffer. The news made Dorthea feel like she had died and gone to heaven.

And it made her want to celebrate
, in her special way, which is exactly what she did on a bright spring day in 1940. In honor of Abbey’s spectacular fall from the mountain, Dorthea decided to climb to the top of it…literally. In Bryson Canyon, which snaked along the back side of town, she’d found a trail that led right up to the back of Sunny Slope Manor, fifty yards from the back porch, even closer if she cared to risk getting caught.

Everybody saw the manor
from town. Any Plain Jane leaving Gerard’s Market with pickles and beer saw the front of it. And if they got stars in their eyes, they might hop into their old jalopy and drive up the hill to see it closer—until the patrolman tapped on their window and told them to get going. They still only saw a postcard though. From her secret spot Dorthea saw the whole family album and sometimes more.

Her devotion to Sunny Slope Manor didn’t come easily though.
Apart from some boulders scattered here and there, the walls of Bryson Canyon weren’t made of rock or even sturdy dirt, but rather a grainy, crumbly substance that seemed to be determinedly grinding itself into sand. The trail itself felt firm enough, probably because of the pounding hoofs from the horses at the manor, whose horseshoe prints she saw on the ground, but it was steep and coated with grainy, slippery sand that sometimes sent the human foot skating without warning.

Separates
had become popular, especially in sportswear, and while Dorthea looked good in anything, and knew it, she made a determined effort to put her fashion ignorance of the old days behind her. Her hiking outfit, by Claire McCardell in New York, consisted of cream colored shorts with decoratively cut pockets, a black belt, and a matching cotton-knit button top, cut just above the waist, with a simple round neckline and cap sleeves. Of course she wore makeup and the requisite bright red lipstick. And if she got dusty, and sometimes bloody, at least she did it in style.

Bryson Canyon didn’t have much life to it, she thought, as the shallow cave that marked the halfway point of her climb came into view. Nothing but lizards, snakes, and a few dumb rabbits
who hadn’t figured out that a feast of green gardens waited for them up at the rim. She knew about the horseback riders but had never seen any of them, or anyone on foot either. Unless a person wanted to spy on Sunny Slope Manor, or maybe hide a body, Bryson Canyon didn’t have much use.

Looking back
a few years, to when she’d gotten her money, she wondered how she hadn’t ended up buzzard food in Bryson Canyon herself. If some scamp from down the hill had shown up on her doorstep talking blackmail, that’s what she would’ve done. And where on earth had she gotten the gall to pull off the scheme without cutting Ermel in on it? Nobody showed up Ermel Railer, that had always been gospel, especially at a time like that when she had her claws out looking for someone to pay for the loss of her dear, cherished, saintly husband. Fortunately, that someone ended up being Ermel’s old enemy the duchess, who got squeezed for a thousand dollars, not because of what happened to Jeb, but because of what he’d been doing when it happened: delivering bootleg liquor to Toomington Hall. Ermel threatened to blab it far and wide so they paid her to shut up. And during this time, as Ermel fussed and fretted over that little pile of money, Dorthea stayed out of sight and finagled her way into a much bigger pile, which she stashed in the narrowest crawl space she could find under their house.

What could
she say? She’d been lucky.

And smart too,
smart beyond her years, because when she finally laid eyes on all that cash and her head started to swim, she didn’t go out and buy a mountain of bangles and baubles and fluffy whatnots, or even a new dress, the thing she wanted most. First of all, she never would’ve gotten away with it, not while living under Ermel’s suspicious glare, but she also knew it didn’t make sense. After all, Ermel had a fancy dress. She showed it to strangers at the drop of a hat and paraded up and down in it like the Queen of Sheba. But she was still Ermel, lower than a bug, and that dress didn’t amount to anything but a make-believe Halloween costume. Dorthea didn’t want that kind of dress. She wanted something better, and while she bided her time, waiting to slip away from Ermel’s clutches, she thought about how to get it:

A lady has a dress and lives in a shack. A lady has a dress
, a diamond broach, and lives in a shack. A lady has a dress, a diamond broach, a fur coat, and it’s too bad she lives in that shack because she really is quite stylish. The stylish lady has a dress, a diamond broach, a fur coat, a new motorcar, and has moved into a cute Craftsman. I hear she is quite charming. The stylish, charming lady has a dress, a diamond broach, a fur coat, a new motorcar, a cute Craftsman, speaks French, and eats in the finest restaurants. Look at that remarkable woman. Who is she? She’s the stylish, charming lady who has a dress….

That’s the kind of dress
Dorthea wanted, for starters, and if her stupid mother didn’t know how to go about getting it, she did. She also knew, even at that young age, that she didn’t have enough money in the shoebox under the house to do it. She had enough to turn herself into another Ermel, with a dozen dresses instead of one, and some jewelry, and an automobile too; or maybe enough to set herself up as a shopkeeper, but not enough to become the fine lady she saw in her mind’s eye. To do that she’d need to find a way to make that pile of money grow into something useful. And why not? Other people did it all the time. Now her turn had come.

From the library she checked out
piles of books about money and millionaires, especially self-made millionaires like John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which she read two and three times each. On Saturday mornings she walked the five miles up to the polo fields at the base of the hill where she slipped through the fence and hid in the bushes under the scoreboard. She didn’t watch the thundering horses, which sometimes charged right up to her, she watched the rich people in the stands. The ladies wore dresses with padded shoulders and hats shaped like chimney pots and bird cages. The men wore derbies and neckties and coats with fury collars. And they all had gobs of money.

But where did they get it? Certainly not all from the same place. There wouldn’t be enough to go around.
No, just like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the others, they made their money in all sorts of different ways. Some, like old man Newfield’s family, who she recognized at the polo field by the way people stopped by his box and paid their respects, got rich from real estate, others from oil or steel or the railroads. All of them made their money at some business or enterprise they knew about. She learned that from the books. To make money you had to know your business better than everyone else. That way when the opportunity came, you saw it first. That’s how it worked.