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Authors: Isis Crawford

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“Luck,” Bernie said.

“You too,” Kylie replied as she turned and walked out of the store.

Libby and Bernie left too. They were quiet until they got back in the van.

Then Libby said, “Things are certainly getting curiouser and curiouser.”

“And messier and messier. We seem to be muddying the waters.”

“Well, we’re certainly not injecting clarity into the situation.”

“Or making Duncan look any better,” Bernie observed.

“There is that. One thing is clear though,” Libby said. “We really have to find Liza.”

“The sooner the better,” Bernie said as she started the van.

Libby consulted her watch. “But now we have to get those pies done.”

Chapter 9

S
ean lit his first cigarette of the day, inhaled and exhaled, sighing in pleasure. He’d been waiting for this for almost two hours.

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the hearse,” Marvin told Sean as they drove over to Pat Dwyer’s office.

Sean had called Dwyer shortly fNew Ydiv>

“My dad complains,” Marvin informed him.

“Why? The corpses aren’t going to care,” Sean told Marvin. “They’re dead already.”

“My dad thinks it’s disrespectful.”

“To whom?”

“Our clientele.”

“Because the dead people are going to get throat cancer?” Sean scoffed, but he rolled down the window anyway so that the hearse would get aired out.

“You know that they know,” Marvin told him.

“The bodies?” Sean asked, playing the innocent. “Now you’re talking to the dead? Wow! You really do need to get into another line of work. Or maybe that’s why you’re so successful.”

Marvin sat up straighter and gripped the wheel. He hated when Mr. Simmons did this. “I’m talking about your daughters, of course,” he said stiffly.

“I know,” Sean said.

“So you know that I was talking about them or you know that they know?” Marvin asked.

“Of course, I know that they know,” Sean said. “I’d have to be a fool to think that they didn’t know. They have noses, don’t they? And I’m not a fool and neither are they. In fact, not only do they know, they also know that I know that they know.”

“So why do you pretend that they don’t know?” Marvin asked, genuinely puzzled by the conversation he was having with Libby’s dad.

“Because then we’d all have to have a talk.” Sean bracketed the word talk with his fingers. “And none of us wants to do that.”

“I’m still not getting it,” Marvin said as he realized too late that the light at the corner of Manes and Allen had turned red. Somehow he avoided slamming on his brakes and coasted to a stop instead.

Sean watched with approval. Marvin’s driving was improving. Slowly. Very slowly. But at least it was going in the right direction. Which was something Sean gave himself a pat on the back for.

“It’s simple,” Sean told him when they were underway again. “If we had a discussion, my daughters would feel it was incumbent upon them to try and get me to stop smoking, which I’m not going to do. Heaven knows, I have few enough pleasures left to me at my advanced age.”

“You’re not that old... .”

“I’m old enough,” Sean said.

“Not really,” Marvin said.

“Fine. I feel old, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good.” Sean didn’t feel it necessary to refer to the disease that had plagued him for the last two years and now seemed to be in remission. He also didn’t see the need to tell Marvin that the reason he thought his private hell had gone into remission was because he’d started smoking again. “As I was saying, I’m old enough, so I think that I should be able to take my pleasures where I find them. If my daughters don’t kn krs ingow, we won’t argue about it. Which seems to me to be a good thing.”

“So you’re advocating peace at any cost?” asked Marvin, who was still managing to keep his eyes on the road instead of looking at Sean. This was a difficult thing for Marvin to do since he was one of those people who always had to look someone in the eye when he talked to him or her. Doing this while maneuvering a heavy moving object upped the ante.

Sean cleared his throat before answering. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he told Marvin. “But I do believe that hypocrisy and/or willful blindness are wonderful tools when used correctly. In fact, I can honestly say that if more people engaged in those practices, life would be a great deal smoother.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” Marvin said. In the heat of the moment, he’d forgotten himself and turned to face Sean to see whether he was kidding or not. “In fact, I know that I don’t.”

“Eyes on the road,” Sean barked. He sighed. Patience, he told himself. All things come to he who waits. Not that he believed that. Actually, the saying just irritated him. So why did he tell himself that? He wasn’t sure, because it just made him even more annoyed.

“Sorry,” Marvin muttered. He’d been doing so well too. He paused to let a truck go by him.

“Of course, you don’t agree with me,” Sean continued when Marvin was paying attention to the traffic again. “You’re much too young. When I was your age I didn’t believe what I just said to you either. I thought you could work everything out by discussing it. Now I know better. It takes being married for a long time to recognize the truth of what I’m telling you.”

Marvin opened his mouth to speak, but Sean stopped him before he got any words out and said, “You’ll thank me for this advice later on. I wish someone had told me what I’m telling you.” And then Sean turned and looked out the window and thought about his wife Rose and about how much he missed her, and about all the things he would have liked to have said to her had he had the chance.

Marvin took the hint and remained quiet for the rest of the trip and concentrated on his driving. He’d made one slip-up already in that department and he didn’t intend to make any more. He reflected that his driving goofs only happened when Libby’s dad was in the car. The truth was that Mr. Simmons made him nervous, and when he got nervous he made mistakes. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Libby’s dad. He did. He liked him a lot.

Better than his own dad, actually. But sometimes he didn’t know what to make of him. He didn’t know when he was kidding and when he was serious. Witness what Mr. Simmons had just said to him. Lying didn’t seem to be the basis for a good relationship and yet he knew from Libby that her mom and dad had been happily married for thirty-five years, so maybe Sean had something there after all.

Marvin was still thinking about the conversation he and Sean had had when he pulled into the small strip mall that housed Pat Dwyer’s office. A former bar owner, Dwyer now owned several McDonald’s franchises and was reputed to be raking in the money, not that you could tell from the location of his office, which was set between a take-out Chinese restaurant and a shoe repair place.

The strip was only six shops long. As Marvin parked the hearse he noticed that the tarmac was showing the aftereffects of winter plowing, the sidewalk was beginning to show signs of wear and tear along the edges, and the lettering on some of the signs on the businesses had begun to fade.

Sean noticed it too as he tossed his cigarette out the window and got kindd b out of the hearse. Even though he was still walking with a cane, he didn’t need help getting out of the vehicle and that fact alone cheered him up enormously. At least he could manage on his own now. He might be slow, but he was out of a wheelchair and moving under his own power and the tremors that had wracked his body were gone. His doctor couldn’t explain it and his daughters said it was through his sheer bloody-mindedness. Sean smiled, suspecting that his daughters might be right.

“Nice ride,” Dwyer commented when Sean and Marvin came inside. “Very funereal. It’s good to see you’re coming up in the world.”

Sean grinned. “I can talk to Marvin’s father. Maybe I can set something up for you as well.”

Dwyer pointed to Sean’s cane. “Fancy schmancy.”

“Just got it,” Sean said.

“I like the silver handle.”

“Me too,” Sean said.

Dwyer gave the cane a careful appraisal. “Kind of upscale for you, isn’t it?”

“Everything is upscale to you, Pat,” Sean said.

“I had a friend who had a cane like that once,” Dwyer remarked. “He told me it was really useful.”

“He must have gotten the model with the sword in it.”

Dwyer laughed and gestured toward the seats in front of his desk. “I’ll take that under advisement. Good to see you out and about,” he said to Sean.

“Glad to be out and about,” Sean replied.

Despite the amount of money Dwyer earned, Sean reflected that the guy did not believe in spending any of it on nonessentials. Which, Sean thought, may have been why Dwyer was so successful. And rich. He put his money where it counted. Into making more money.

Dwyer’s office was as bare bones as you could get without doing business out of your car. He didn’t have a secretary, let alone a personal assistant. In the event that he needed extra help, which was unlikely, he called a temp service. Otherwise he used a tax attorney and that was the extent of his payroll. He made his own phone calls and wrote down his own appointments and kept his own books. “That way I know what’s going on and no one else does,” he was frequently heard to tell his stepson, who wanted him to upgrade and move to a fancier place, just so he could brag about it, in Dwyer’s opinion.

The only decorations in Dwyer’s office were his wrestling trophies, his plaques from college—he’d been New York State champion back in the day—and the plaques commemorating the victories of the high school wrestling team he still coached. Other than that, Dwyer’s office walls were bare. No point in wasting money on pictures, in his opinion. Or furniture either.

He’d gotten his desk at Walmart and his chair, file cabinets, and shelving at Sam’s Club. The chairs that Sean and Marvin were now sitting on had come from a garage sale at Dwyer’s church, as had the rug on the floor and the coffee maker on the small table in the corner. Dwyer could not see stopping and spending time and money buying coffee when he could make a perfectly respectable cup by himself.

Sean watched as Dwyer took a Cuban cigar out of the humidor on his desk—the cigars were the only luxury he allowed himself—clipped off the end with a small silver cutter and applied a match to it. When he’d gotten the cigar going, he said, “So I understand what you’re doing and why, but I don’t see how I can help.”

Sean lit another cigarette and Dwyer pushed an ashtray across the desk for him. Wa kk f"1etching both men, Marvin began to feel as if he was in a fifties movie. The only thing missing was the blond secretary.

“If I didn’t think you could help me, I wouldn’t be here,” Sean replied.

Dwyer took another puff of his cigar and exhaled. “I’m listening.”

“Nice to know. I already told you on the phone. I want to know anything you can tell me about Mulroney—”

“You think he’s involved?” Dwyer asked before Sean could finish his sentence .

“Probably not,” Sean conceded. “But the homicide did take place outside his establishment and it never hurts to be thorough.”

“Lucy doesn’t think so,” Dwyer observed.

“No, he certainly doesn’t,” Sean agreed.

“Maybe if you’d been less thorough you’d still be chief of police and Lucy would be in a patrol car,” Dwyer observed.

Sean thought about his answer for a minute. Then he said, “You’re probably right, but I wouldn’t go back and change the way I did things even if I could.”

“I never thought you would want to,” Dwyer replied, nodding at the truth of Sean’s statement. Then he cursed as he flicked an ash off the front of his suit jacket. The jacket had small burn marks from his cigars all over it. “Anne is going to kill me,” he said.

“How’s she going to tell that this is a new one?” Sean asked. “You’ve got several already. I count eight.”

“It’s nine actually, and she can tell. Just like Rose could have told. Nothing gets by Anne.”

“This is true,” Sean said, thinking back to Rose and the accuracy of Dwyer’s statement. He’d never been able to get anything by Rose. Ever. Although he’d tried really, really hard numerous times. Like with the fireworks. But Rose had always known when he’d bought them no matter how hard he tried to hide the fact. Amazing. He took another puff of his cigarette and refocused on the matter at hand.

“So did Mulroney have any ties to Sweeney?” Sean asked.

“You mean other than being Irish?”

“Yeah. Other than being Irish.”

“And Sweeney being a four-star patron of said establishment.”

“Yes. Other than that.”

Dwyer tapped the remaining ash from his cigar into the ashtray and sat back in his seat. “You know I’ve been out of business with Mulroney for the last two years and we haven’t exactly kept in touch.”

Sean did the same with his cigarette. “Yeah. I heard from Clyde you guys weren’t on the best of terms when you parted.”

“You could say that,” Dwyer said. “So I really don’t know much about Sweeney. Two years ago I’d have told you that they weren’t exactly tight.”

“Do you know if Mulroney invested with him?” Sean asked.

Dwyer took a moment to relight his cigarette before answering. “Yeah. He always was a sucker for a quick buck.”

“Well, he can’t have been that badly hurt,” Marvin said.

Both men stopped talking and looked at him.

“He bought a plane recently,” Marvin stammered.

“A jet?” Sean asked.