Mummers' Curse (22 page)

That left the issue of the gun and its disposal, now that I knew it hadn’t been the one in my purse. Of course, he—whichever he or she it was—could have left the parade later in order to chuck the murder weapon. I assumed the police had searched the multitude of trash baskets along the route.

Vincent, now at the far corner of the Square, looked innocuous and familiar, but I didn’t trust him anymore. He wore a mask and disguise even when in street clothes.

A shadow fell on me, and the temperature dropped along with the light level. I looked up and saw the man from the corner, he of the satin jacket and leather earflaps, deliberately, resolutely approaching, one hand holding his cigar, the other half-extended in my direction.

I stood so abruptly, the remains of my chicken leg and my container of juice fell to the ground. I started to retrieve them, then decided that being a litterer beat being a corpse, and I stood up again and backed off.

“Wait!” he called out. “Hey! Don’t be scared. You’re Amanda Pepper, the teacher from across the street, right?”

“Why?” I eyed him from ten feet away. Unfortunately, from that position, I could also eye my pocketbook where I’d left it on the bench.

“I’ve been waiting to talk with you. I didn’t want to intrude while you were teaching, or talking with that man.”

“Are you a parent?”

He nodded.

“Whose?” I asked.

“Oh, you mean of somebody there?” He tilted his head toward the school. “No. Lookit—no need to be afraid of me. I’m with B.L.T. & G.”

“Excuse me?”

“The law firm. Benthelwaite, LaVonne—”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that…”

“I know.” He looked sympathetic. “The world today, who can tell? I don’t blame you a bit. My wife’s the same way about strangers, and I say, good. Better safe than sorry.”

“What is this about, then?” I moved closer to grab my bag. “What would a law firm want with me? I hope I’ve been named in somebody’s will.”

He cleared his throat. I dove, as unobtrusively as I could, for my possessions and in mid-swoop, he spoke.

“I thought you should see this,” he said.

I turned toward him. He offered me a letter, and automatically, I took it.

“I thought you should see that,” he said again, “so that you would be legally and properly informed that you are being sued by Phillipa and Thomas Field for excessive and unfair treatment of their daughter Renata, which has caused her and her parents grievous mental anguish and created insurmountable impediments to her future plans.”

Sued? Me? Renata?

She’d been leaning over the railing at the stairs, signaling this man. Renata had let him know where I was.

That’s why she’d been disappointed that I wouldn’t be in my room during lunch. Not because of her desire for my company, but because she’d wanted to witness my being served the papers. I looked up now, and there she was, peering white-faced out of my classroom window.

No, surely there was another explanation. I’d lost my sense of humor. Nobody takes a teacher to court for a deservedly lousy grade.

“You’re kidding, right? You aren’t really a lawyer, are you?”

“Never said I was one. I’m with B.L.T. & G.”

“You’re an actor, am I right? One of those people you hire to pull funny stunts and practical jokes.”

“No and no again,” he said. The temperature dropped into a frozen, bleak hell. “Not an actor. Not a funny stunt. Real. A process server, you’d call me. Not a joke. You’re in trouble, lady. Not a joke at all.”

Thirteen

THE FRONT DOOR OPENED AND A WEARY-LOOKING C.K. ENTERED.

“Sued!” I said by way of greeting. “I’m being sued over a grade!
Sued!
” As if repetition neutralized the word.

I sat facing the fire, finding no serenity in its flames.

“You’re kidding, right?” He checked my expression, then shook his head, went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and poured himself a glass of wine. “Want something?” he called out. “Who’s suin’?”

“Renata’s parents! And I’ve bent over backwards for her, given her a way to pass when she doesn’t deserve even that!”

“Wine?” he asked.

I thought he was giving me permission to whine, for which I was grateful. I wanted to complain on an operatic scale, and endlessly. I explained the shameful ridiculousness of the situation in minute detail.

The legal papers said I had not sufficiently or adequately clarified my grading system, causing Renata to fail to meet arbitrary classroom standards. With no regard to her future, I had penalized her. It appeared she had been absent the first day of the semester and had apparently not heard my introductory speech on grading.

As if any school in the known universe considers cheating, plagiarizing, and goofing off acceptable.

Mackenzie patiently listened and handed me a glass of wine.

“Sued! Me!” I waved the papers I’d been served. “It’ll cost a fortune to defend myself, and I don’t even know against what. Will the school back me? What do I do?”

“Talk to a lawyer,” Mackenzie said. “Immediately. Do we know anybody who handles that kind of law?”

“Sleaze law?” His words translated into the dusty whoosh of money fluttering out of my hands. How many billable hours and minutes and seconds left on ray Doomsday clock? “These things drag on for years.” I’d read
Bleak House
, where the lawsuit dragged on until there was not a penny left in the till.

Nothing had changed since Dickens’s time, except that I was starting out penniless and lawyers’ fees were even higher.

“I had an interestin’ day, too,” Mackenzie said. “If you’re done, that is.”

Done? Not at all, and I resented any attempt to hurry the process. Besides, I felt incapable of responding to anybody else’s news or problems until I was well and truly done. I was being
sued
for doing my job! “Don’t you care?” I asked. It was not a question, but a charge.

He refuted it. “Of course.” I was stressing him out, melting his speech, so that I became a soft vowel that dissolved into the words around it. “It’s a frivolous suit,” he went on, in a torrent of sinuous syllables, “brought by mean-spirited, ignorant people who haven’t a clue about the purpose of education, and it’ll burn time, money, and emotions and wind up nowhere, and I’m sorry for the waste of your talents and energy this’ll cost.”

I must admit, I was impressed, weak with gratitude. I had a soul mate who took my woes to heart.

“But the thing is,” he continued, “you asked what you should do and I said you needed legal advice, and soon. What else is left to say? The only law I’m conversant with has to do with dead bodies, rights to remain silent. Things like that. If you’d done away with Renata, I’d be of use. Otherwise…” He glanced at his watch.

Was he implying that having said everything about the topic, we could move on? What about carrying on? Actual, bona fide lamentations? I suddenly missed my little house shared with only the cat, who’d willingly endured—or ignored—as much obsessive self-pity as I provided. Time-sharing a life with a human had a real downside.

Even the feline soul mate was a turncoat. He half dozed, eyes open, near Mackenzie’s favorite chair, looking bored with me, too.

Tough. I wasn’t through. “Then there’s her guilt-ridden accomplice, Sally,” I said. Who needed to hear what had happened on his job, anyway, given that the answer would, always, be murder had happened. Again. “She’s the complete opposite, demanding punishment, over-atoning…”

“Uh-huh,” Mackenzie said. “You hungry?”

“Boneless chicken breasts on the counter.”

He retrieved the plate. “What happened to them? Looks like roadkill.”

“I tenderized them.”

“Tough breasts? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Pounded breasts. Very California cuisine. After saying ‘have a nice day’ that’s how they sublimate their pent-up aggression.”

“It didn’t do the trick for you, though,” he said mildly. “Mind if I take over in here?”

I had enjoyed bludgeoning the meat, but I had no energy left, and was more than willing to pass the torch.

He busied himself in the kitchen, or in that section of the loft so designated since there really wasn’t a room in which to go. We had a paucity of doors to slam and not much place to hide. I missed my house again.

“Turn on the news, would you?” he called out.

“Why? You already know the big stories.” He had a perverse need to listen to the media’s distortions of the crimes he knew firsthand.

“You don’t,” he answered, “an’ you might want to.” I turned the TV on.

The screen filled with two perkies whose expressions suggested that they never once heard the headlines they read off the monitor. Just once, I’d like to see revulsion, horror, or miserable unhappiness mar their happy-news faces. Maybe if I told them about my lawsuit?

That wasn’t a half-bad idea. It wouldn’t touch their plastic hearts, but it could put the suit under the glare of scrutiny. If everybody knew what the Fields were doing, maybe they’d be too ashamed to do it. I had to find out how a non-celebrity, an ordinary teacher turned her woes into sound bites.

“Our lead story tonight answers, at least partially, a local mystery that has troubled the city through the holiday season.” You could tell this was serious, not cute or human-interesty, because the male anchor had been assigned the telling of it. Sexist, but true. “For more than two weeks, a search has been on for Theodore Serfi—”

“They found him?”

“—who disappeared in late December after attending a meeting of his Mummers’ club. There have been many theories and some allegations since then, but not until today has there been an answer.”

“A real answer?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried.” Mackenzie sounded weary. “But th’ only news our wire service picked up was that you were bein’ sued.”

He was a tolerant man. I’d have to remember that.

The screen showed a large brick building, not unlike ours, but not like it, either. The on-screen place did not have near neighbors or trendy galleries at street level. It stood alone, in the middle of a deserted parking lot. Windows were missing, and on its side, ers was visible in outline, as if large metal letters had been ripped off the bricks. A reporter—female, this time—held a mike and tried not to shiver as she smiled at the camera. “We’re here at the former home of Stanley Brothers.”

Mackenzie hissed. A lot of the city responded that way to the name of the brothers whose candy plant—licorice was their specialty—had defined their neighborhood as its home for generations. Fathers, sons, and grandsons had filled spots on their production lines until the past March, when Stanley Brothers gave its one thousand two hundred employees seven days’ notice. This plant, they said, had become “unnecessary.” So had its workers. Licorice could be produced more cheaply elsewhere on the globe. And so died a lot of jobs and another chunk of city, and there weren’t a whole lot of other licorice makers waiting to absorb the displaced.

Since March, the building had been attacked in lieu of its departed management. Those broken windows that had been boarded up had spiderwebs of graffiti on them. The bricks were spray painted as well, as was a pathetic for rent sign that mentioned the square feet available. And all around the building, even as the camera panned, shards of glass and blooms of trash. It looked like what it was, the site of a catastrophe.

The reporter took it all in stride, stepping lightly through the ruins. That’s how she kept from being as unemployed as the erstwhile candy makers. “Late last night, acting on an anonymous tip, police combed this empty factory, and in a storage room still filled with cellophane bags in which licorice was once packed, they found the frozen body of Theodore Serfi. Preliminary reports indicate the presence of multiple gunshot wounds, although police have not yet determined the time or precise cause of death.”

The ghoulish camera switched to the grieving father, and an offscreen voice asked how he felt. What did they expect him to say? Why did they ask such things?

“I’m glad they finally found him. I knew he didn’t run away or just leave before Christmas and the parade, the way people said. My son wouldn’t do that.” He cleared his throat. “And now,” he continued, “let him rest in peace. And I hope the police find whoever did this horrible thing.” Then he waved them off.

The family, the reporter went on to say, has always denied any criminal connections and has no theory as to why this happened or who might have done it.

Speaking of which, the camera was now on none other than Arthur King, standing in front of his meat-packing house, as elegant a sausage maven as ever. “If you’ve driven around the city lately,” the reporter said, “you may have seen somebody’s idea of a joke, the defaced ads for King’s Sausage and the inferences that they, or members of that family, had something to do with the disappearance of Teddy Serfi.”

Arthur nodded. He wore a navy blue topcoat and a silvery white fringed scarf that looked color-coordinated with his hair. He wasn’t carrying a book. Maybe he’d extracted everything he could from Machiavelli.

“You must be relieved by today’s discovery,” the reporter simpered.

How had they known to go to him? How had he known how to turn his private botherations into news? Would he tell me if I asked?

“We have mushrooms?” Mackenzie called over.

“Dried ones.” Even without mushrooms, he’d created a mouth-watering ambience. Life was good as long as garlic perfumed the air.

“Everyone in any way connected with King’s Sausage is relieved,” Arthur said. “And exonerated. Maybe this will prevent others in the future from leaping to unsubstantiated conclusions and hurting innocent parties. Our long and honorable reputation has been grievously injured by the deliberate and organized slanderous campaign of people who may have been understandably upset, but who chose a bad way to express their worry and grief.”

Enough already about the besmirched honor of sausage.

“For thirty years, we have stood for cleanliness and purity of product, and so it remains. All of us at King’s Sausage hope this sordid affair and all the unjustified allegations are now a thing of the past, and that the long and honorable tradition of our company will be restored.”