With Friends Like These...
With Friends Like These... - An Amanda Pepper Mystery
With Friends Like These…
By Gillian Roberts
Copyright 2012 by Gillian Roberts
Cover Copyright 2012 by
Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1993.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing
Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Philly Stakes
I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
For Jean Naggar—volumes of affection and appreciation.
An Amanda Pepper Mystery
By Gillian Roberts
Introduction
If asked, I’d say that I never use people I know as characters. Certainly not as murder victims.
That is not 100% true.
The exception—and honestly, the only exception—is
With Friends Like These…
in which I killed someone I knew who had grievously hurt—not physically, but nonetheless profoundly—a vulnerable friend.
Crimes like his fascinate and horrify me. There are too many legal (though unethical and immoral) ways to cripple someone’s life or hopes, and those transgressors don’t go to prison.
The story kept troubling me, and at some point, I heard myself mutter, “I could just kill him!” Then I remembered that I wrote mysteries and I could kill him.
And so I did.
And it felt great.
His original offense is not in the book. Instead, I stitched together his personality traits with a news story about another grave betrayer of trust, added a few students, a little Mother Goose, a bit of Oscar Wilde and advice from Dr. Spock. The result was
With Friends Like These….
A note about the “now” of this book. When I wrote the series, I kept the time unspecific, hoping the books wouldn’t ever feel dated. However, my mind was on crime and I forgot about progress. Now, we live in a different world. For starters, you’re reading this on an electronic device Amanda could not have imagined. In this book, music is still played on vinyl or heard on a Walkman, and nobody has a cellphone, personal computer or other device we take for granted. The one thing that hasn’t changed is human nature with all its capacity for good and less than good. Look—it drove me to murder. But only this once. Honestly.
I hope you enjoy
With Friends Like These…
and I hope you don’t have any friends like that.
Gillian Roberts
March 2012
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. Honestly. Earlier, it had been a dim and stormy day. Demonstrating no originality, March had indeed come in like a lion—a wet, angry one who blew ill winds every which way.
And here I was, not home cuddling by the fire with whatever was available—a man, a cat, a book—but driving in the rain with my mother, wearing my sister’s panty hose and fulfilling social obligations that were not mine.
I clutched the steering wheel and thought about the difficulty of raising parents, particularly mine, particularly today.
My father had overreacted, overprotected, and overparented me into this pickle. Generally speaking, my father is so quiet that any woman near him (namely my mother) gets the urge to scream, simply to compensate for the sound deficit. His favorite way of interacting with the women of his family is from behind the shelter of his newspaper.
All the same, this afternoon some late-blooming swashbuckler hormone kicked into his system and he suffered an attack of galloping, completely unnecessary heroism. As a result, he lost his mobility and I lost my Sunday night.
* * *
We had all been in my sister’s living room, enduring the sometimes elusive pleasures of a Long Parental Visit. Bea and Gilbert Pepper, aka. Mom and Dad, had arrived four days earlier. Since then I’d been puzzling how to once and for all establish the concept that I was not willing to be a child for as long as Gilbert and Bea were willing to be parents—i.e., forever, i.e., right now.
It was hard pondering this delicate issue or anything else in the din of family. Everyone—except my father—talked at once, and the chatter was compounded by background music: my niece Karen’s recording of Mother Goose done rap style. I remembered how unfond I had once been of the endless, enclosed hours of Sundays, and I remembered why.
I allocated twenty more minutes to this visit, by which time my exit wouldn’t seem abrupt or overeager. The good thing about teaching English is that the bad thing about teaching English—endless papers to mark—provides a perpetual excuse to split.
Once I knew there was a definite reprieve ahead, I relaxed and tuned back into the conversation.
“I do hope the messenger delivered the gift in time,” my mother was saying. “I’ve never done this before.” She had read, in People magazine, of tributes arriving via messenger, and had decided that was the appropriate style when gifting a Somebody. Apparently, the host of the party she was attending tonight fit that category. “And not too soon,” she continued. “What if it arrives before Lyle gets there? Would the hotel accept it?”
Everybody murmured reassurances, just as everybody had fifteen minutes earlier, the last time she’d worried over the matter. Only Karen, dancing to her barked-out rhymes, seemed unconcerned.
My Floridian parents had braved the last gasps of a Philadelphia winter to attend the fiftieth birthday party of a man they said was an old friend, but whose name I’d never heard. I don’t keep close tabs on my parents’ social life, but the invitation confused me, particularly since the birthday boy had sent them their airline tickets and was treating them—and all his other out-of-town guests—to rooms at the small hotel where the party would be held.
I was amazed by this stranger’s largesse, so that now, when the conversation again veered toward the party, I poked around for more information. “Mom,” I said, “explain why I’ve never heard of Lyle Zacharias.”
“I told you,” my mother said. “We’ve been out of touch for a long time.”
About then my niece yelped. That’s all it was, a minor blip, a five-year-old’s reaction to bumping an unimportant body part on the coffee table.
But my father must have heard something primitive, a summons. He levitated, saying “Whooah!” or “Oh, woe!” and frantically, as if Karen were sinking into quicksand with only her teensy nose still poking out, he attempted to swing—without benefit of a vine—across the room to rescue his granddamsel in distress.
There were suddenly a lot of other sounds, too. Karen’s infant brother, Alexander, keened. Their mother, my sister Beth, said, “Dad?” My mother said, “Gilbert! What on earth are you—” and even I stood and cried, futilely, “Watch out!” Only Karen, her bump forgotten, said nothing whatsoever. She was too busy boogying again.
Meanwhile, half of my father landed on one of her former musical selections and, almost immediately, his swash buckled. Down onto a pink plastic record went his right foot, skating straight ahead. His left foot, however, stayed put, pending further instructions. The rest of him flailed and looked bewildered, like a cartoon character running on air over a chasm.
The family attempted a save, but by then he’d achieved a split Baryshnikov would envy. He made another, sadder and less heroic “Whooah” and collapsed, the rug-skating leg tilting where it should not.
* * *
It’s amazing how much time and plaster tape and medical staff it takes to set a fracture. As wet gray day slid into wetter, darker night, we hobbled back to Beth’s house. The party my parents had flown hither to attend loomed.
My mother bit her lower lip and looked like the frantic heroine of a silent film. My father grinned wickedly. His painkillered pupils were pinwheels. A whole new Daddy on dope. I told him he’d look sexy on crutches at the party.
My practical sister—who, being married, had a permanent companion, and who was therefore in no danger of being deputized as Mom’s date—reacted immediately. “That little hotel might not have an elevator, Mandy! After all, it used to be a boardinghouse. How would Daddy get to his room?”
“We could call and find out.” I was snappish, but only because I knew what was coming. I tried to stop it, but it was as effective as putting a hand up to stop a boulder rolling downhill. “And if there’s no elevator, Mom and Dad can come back here tonight.”
“Gilbert,” my mother said. “Lyle wants you, not me, at his party. He wasn’t part of my family.”
Did that mean, then, that this Lyle person, this Somebody, was a secret part of my father’s family? The black sheep? That sounded almost interesting. “Who is this man?” I asked again.
My father beamed. Sedated, he was more placidly impervious to female noises than ever. I couldn’t believe my mother wanted to be accompanied by a space cadet, but the need for an escort has made lots of women drop their standards.
“He’s a producer.” My mother tossed the words my way. An answer, I realized. Lyle the mystery man was a producer.
My mother’s attention was again wholly on my father. “Gilbert?” His answer was the downward flutter of his eyelids.
“Broadway?” The word producer is so mysterious. What does it mean? What does one do? If it’s real, why isn’t there a college major called Producing?
“Television.” My mother woefully considered her comatose husband.
“What kind of—”
“The Second Generation.” Beth looked sheepish. “It’s on every afternoon. Something to do while I’m feeding the baby.”
My mother eyed her older daughter with concern.
“Don’t worry,” Beth said. “Dr. Spock does not object to watching soaps while nursing.”
I could almost see my mother scan the Dr. Spock database in her brain. He’d been her guru, and the final authority during our growing years, and she still idolized him. But we weren’t talking about pediatricians. We were talking about producers, and I steered my mother back to the topic.
“Years ago, Lyle had a show on Broadway,” she said. “A great big hit. Then it became a TV series, and that’s how he got into the field.” She turned back to my father, who was awake, but just barely. “We really have to go. Everybody will be there,” she said. “And I’ve already made all those tarts and messengered them.”
That was it, I was sure. She’d done a jet-set thing as per People magazine, and she wanted—and deserved—the acclaim for both her baking and her au courant presentation. Tarts seemed poor reasons for dragging a semiconscious man on crutches to a party, but as I knew who his stand-in was likely to be, I said nothing.
“The queen of hearts, she made some tarts,” Karen chanted. There were collective frowns as we were reminded of her nursery rhyme collection, and in fact, of the infamous pink record that had resulted in this impasse. Karen didn’t notice. “All on a summer’s day!” she continued. “The knave of hearts, he stole—”
“How can we accept plane tickets from the man and then not go to his party?” my mother asked.
“I didn’t ask him to invite me.” My father spoke slowly. “You’re the one who insisted we accept, even though you didn’t like him, either, after….”
“You’re too harsh,” my mother said. “Be tolerant. Think about how much he’s suffered. He’s reaching out to us now.”
She didn’t deny my father’s accusation that she disliked Lyle Zacharias. But her overabundant supply of guilt and do-goodness would demand that she celebrate the birth of a man she wasn’t fond of, if she thought he’d suffered in some way.
“You go,” my father urged.
“Alone?” My mother’s jaw dangled. No date for a party?
I deliberately ignored the wide-eyed flares my sister was hurling in my direction. She escalated to a psst that I was forced to acknowledge. Behind my mother’s back she mouthed, silently, a question. It didn’t take long to decipher it, although I wished I hadn’t.
