Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery (21 page)

He disconnected and came over to
sit next to Margo. Her face was bleak, as I felt sure mine must be.

“Now what?” she asked wanly.

He put his arm around her
shoulders. “Now, we wait.”

Wait, we did, for what seemed like
days but in fact
was
only a couple of hours. Just
before dawn
Strutter
arrived, and the four of us sat
in near silence, comforted by each other’s presence as the interminable minutes
crept by. Occasionally the house phone rang, and one or another of us would
make an effort not to snap at Carla or Isabelle or Myron
Lifschitz’s
mother, improbably enough, as we informed them there was nothing new to report
and thanked them for their concern.

And then, as suddenly as it had
begun, it was over. At six-fifteen, John’s cell phone rang. He punched the talk
button and held it to his ear, his face tense.

“
Harkness
,”
he barked. Then, “Yes. Yes. No,” and finally, “We’re on our way. Tell them
thanks. I owe them one.” He squeezed Margo’s shoulders, and an infrequent smile
transformed his face as he relayed the good news. “It’s okay. The Doylestown
police have May, and she’s fine.”

Margo’s eyes were wide as she
searched her husband’s face for further confirmation. She needed more details before
she could let go of her fear.

John understood. “She’s
complaining about the coffee,” he told her gently.

Margo’s smile threatened to split
her face in two as
Strutter
and I let out the breaths
we’d been holding. “She’s fine,” Margo reassured us, and we knew it must be
true.

Nineteen

May’s story, when she told it to
us late Sunday afternoon, was pure Farnsworth—part horrifying and part heroic
with a dash of Lucille Ball slapstick. I could tell by the way Margo stuck to
May’s side like a burr that she had been half out of her mind with worry.

A cold rain dripped outside the
windows. May, Margo,
Strutter
and I were lounging in
May’s living room, which was starting to feel like our second home. “Not having
to haul logs in from the garage is a plus at my age, especially under the
current circumstances.” She held up a remote control, aimed it at the fireplace
and clicked. With a soft whoosh, the gas ignited, and cheerful flames flickered
among the artfully stacked ceramic logs.

“Nice,”
Strutter
approved as she reached for another slice of pizza. She picked it up but
returned it almost immediately to the carton on the coffee table. “I just
can’t,” she groaned. “I’m stuffed.”

“Don’t fret, sweetie, you did your
best,” Margo consoled her. She herself retrieved the abandoned slice and took a
hefty bite. I assumed it would join the other three slices she’d already
consumed in the hollow leg I’d long suspected her of having, since she never
seemed to gain an ounce.

“Okay, May, we’re fed, and we all
have fresh glasses of wine. We’ve been patient just as long as we can, so give
with the details,” I ordered as sternly as my full stomach and the warmth of
the fireplace would allow.

She looked around the room at us
before beginning. “I will, but first I want to tell you how much I appreciate
each one of you and how glad I am to be able to call you my friends. Thank you
for giving a damn about me. It means more than I can say.”

“Back at you,” said
Strutter
as Margo squeezed May’s arm, and I smiled and
nodded.

“Now quit
stallin
’,”
Margo added. You know we’re simply
dyin
’ to hear all
about your
bein
’ kidnapped by Judy Holloway’s crazed
husband.”

May’s mouth dropped open. “Margo
Farnsworth
Harkness
, don’t you ever say that again.
That’s not what happened at all, as that gorgeous husband of yours knows, so
stop making jokes. That’s how rumors get started, as if I’m not already the
subject of enough gossip around this neighborhood. Can you imagine the talk
that would be
flyin
’ around if one of these proper
northerners got an idea like that?”

“May!” we chorused, and “Enough!”
and “Tell us what happened, for pity’s sake!”

“All right, all
right.
Don’t get all het up.” May surrendered and finally launched into
her delayed narrative.

“It was pretty late Friday evening
when
Izzy
and I got through hashing things out, and I
took her back to Vista View. I was more than ready for bed, but when I went to
put my cell phone in the charger, I couldn’t find my purse. Figuring I must
have left it in the car, I went out to the garage to collect it. Sure enough,
there it was on the front seat. I’d left the garage door up, too, which goes to
show how tired I was.

“I was
draggin
’
myself back up the garage stairs and reaching for the automatic door closer
when a car pulled into the driveway behind me. I put a hand above my eyes to
try to see through the glare of the headlights and put my purse down on the
stair landing while I went to see who it was.” She shook her head. “Did I ever
mention that a woman should never, ever walk away from her purse? It rarely ends
well.”

“I hear that,”
Strutter
agreed. “I left mine in a cab once on the way to the airport …”

“Emma was always leaving hers in a
friend’s car,” I chimed in, “and one time I walked away from mine in the lobby
of a New York hotel. I had my coat over my arm and didn’t notice …”

“When John and I drove over here
and found the garage door open and your purse
lyin
’
there …” Margo started.

“Ladies!”
May clapped her hands to reclaim our attention. “If you want me to get through
this sometime this evening, could you keep your pretty mouths shut for the duration?”

We exchanged sheepish glances and
subsided. May smiled fondly at us and continued.

“I walked out to see who it was in
my driveway at nearly midnight, but I couldn’t make out the driver. I was
tired, and even in the daylight, I have trouble telling one car from another.
They’re either big or little, dark colored or light, that’s about it. Make and
model? Forget about it.”

“I’m the same way,” I volunteered
but was silenced when
Strutter
pinched my arm. “Ouch!
Sorry.”

May
looked
amused. “So I’m standing there in my dainty little bedroom slippers with the
kitten heels, no sweater or coat, trying to make sense of this car in my
driveway, when the door opens. The overhead light came on long enough for me to
see a very large, very drunk man lunge out of the driver’s seat, so naturally,
I jumped backward.”

“Well, naturally,”
Strutter
couldn’t help commenting. I took the opportunity
to return her pinch. She slapped my hand and frowned.

“That’s when I missed my footing
and twisted my ankle before
landin
’ on my shapely
derriere on the front sidewalk. Fortunately, as things turned out, it was my
left ankle.”

We all gazed at the joint in
question, which was propped on an ottoman and encased in ice packs. May’s
beautifully
pedicured
toes were an alarming shade of
blue-black, which the emergency room doctor had assured May would soon fade.

“Did the brute even help you up?”
Margo questioned.

May
made
a face. “It was all he could do to stand up
himself
,
let alone give me a hand. The smell of whiskey coming off him was overwhelming.
So he stood there,
hangin
’ on to the door of his
little car, weaving around and slurring something unintelligible about his wife
and how I’d corrupted the woman he loved and turned her into a Jezebel, while I
hauled myself off the bricks by holding onto the lamppost. It must have been
pretty funny to watch.” She actually chuckled as she refreshed herself with a
sip of wine.

“Except nobody else was there to
see you,” I said, warning
Strutter
off with a look.

“Except for that,” May agreed. “By
then I’d figured out that the whiskey-soaked bear was probably the husband of
Judy Holloway, since there seemed to be a bunch of messages from Judy on my
phone that I had yet to listen to, and for some reason he’d driven all the way
from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to confront me in person. Lord knows how long
he’d been soused, but I can tell you it was a miracle he made it here without
killing himself or someone else. The bottle of Scotch on the floor of his car
was almost empty.” She wrinkled her nose. “I just hate the smell of Scotch
whiskey.”

“Auntie May, how did you wind up
in the car with him? Why didn’t you just run into the house—or hobble, I guess
it would have been,” Margo amended.

“Because I’m too stupid to live,”
May said with resignation. “You know those cheesy horror movies where the
sleeping woman is awakened by the sound of an intruder, and instead of locking
herself in the bathroom and calling 911 on her cell
phone,
she goes downstairs in her
nightie
to see who it is?
That would be me.”

“So what did you do?”
Strutter
prompted.

“By then Bob was draped on me like
two hundred and fifty pounds of misery,
beggin
’ me to
release his wife from her publication contract because he had to stop her
sinful ways and save their marriage, make her see reason. Believe me, I would
have been only too willing to turn him over to Judy, but unfortunately, she was
back in Pennsylvania, probably worried to death about him. My one thought was
to get to my phone and call her, but that wasn’t looking possible, what with my
bum ankle and a drunk hanging around my neck.”

“Why didn’t you open your mouth
and scream for help?” Margo demanded.

“Hello, too stupid to live,
remember
?” May
said
once again. “It
simply never occurred to me to start making a fuss after everything that had happened
last week. I was desperate to keep the drama to a minimum. It was clear this
fool meant me no harm. He only wanted to stop his wife from
bein
’
a porn author, which is how some folks still think of erotica. He was in no
condition to understand my
tellin
’ him that what she
chose to write was entirely her decision, and he surely was in no condition to
drive
himself
anywhere, so I decided to drive him
myself.”

“To
Pennsylvania?”
I yelped, and May laughed.

“That wasn’t my original
intention. I thought maybe a nice motel somewhere on the Berlin Turnpike. They
probably wouldn’t rent a room to a drunken lout, but I figured I could use a
credit card to do it, drop him off in a room and call a cab to get myself home
after I spoke with Judy. So I managed to
wrangle
Bob
into the back of the car—thank goodness his Toyota was a four-door—and then
climbed into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition, so off we went.”

“In the middle of the night,” I
commented unnecessarily.

“In bedroom slippers and no coat,”
said
Strutter
, ever the mom.

“Without your purse and,
therefore, no money, credit card or cell phone with which to carry out your
plan,” Margo muttered, scowling.

“And no driver’s license, don’t
forget, which meant I had no identification on me. Yes, in all the confusion, I
forgot about my purse. If I’d been pulled over by a cop, he would have thought
I was some gaga old lady driving around with a drunk in my back seat.”

We stared at her silently.

“Okay, so at that moment I
was
a gaga old lady with a drunk in my
back seat, but my plan would have worked fine if only I’d remembered to grab my
purse off the landing in the garage.” She looked around brightly. “Don’t you
think?”

This time Margo was the first to
speak. “I think
gettin
’ pulled over by a cop would
have been the best thing that could have happened. It might have been a little
embarrassin
’ for a few minutes, but things would have been
sorted out pretty quick, and you wouldn’t have wound up on the highway at three
in the
mornin
’ on your way to Pennsylvania.”

Strutter
flinched and covered her eyes with one hand.

“Yes, how did that happen? I
thought you were headed for a local motel,” I said.

May sighed. “This is where it gets
interesting.”

Strutter
uncovered her eyes. “
This
is where it
gets interesting?”

“I got to the Berlin Turnpike okay
and was heading south, looking for a motel with a vacancy sign. I saw a couple,
but every time I slowed down and turned into a parking lot, Bob would wake up
and start
thrashin
’ around, making a big old fuss, so
I’d have to step on the gas and move on.”

“Sounds like driving around with a
cranky baby,”
Strutter
mused, apparently deciding to
listen to the rest of May’s story without further censure. “You think you’ve
finally gotten him to sleep, and the minute you stop, he wakes up and starts
crying again.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly,” May
beamed, grateful that at least one of her listeners understood her dilemma,
“but my baby weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and wasn’t strapped in.”

“So you just kept going south?” I
prompted.

“South and west, actually,” May
confirmed. “By the time I got to New York, I was on autopilot. Trying to find a
place to stop seemed like too much trouble at that point, so I kept on driving.
It was really sort of peaceful at that time of night, or should I say morning?
Anyway, then I was in New Jersey, and I figured, what the heck? I’ll just keep
going to Doylestown. It’s right over the border from New Jersey. Judy showed me
on a map once.”

We looked at each other,
exasperated but intrigued, too, and more than a little awed by this senior
citizen’s gumption.

“Did you even look at the gas
gauge?”
Strutter
demanded.

“And didn’t you need to pee?”
Margo added, voicing the thought we all shared.

“Yes, and desperately,” May
answered their questions in order, “but rest stops were out of the question
with Bob the Bear as a passenger. I couldn’t very well leave him unattended
while I visited a ladies room, assuming I could even find one. By the way,
those Toyotas are amazingly fuel efficient. I made it all the way to Doylestown
on about half a tank of gas. It was my own tank that ultimately was my
downfall, or my salvation, depending on how you look at it.”

“Couldn’t hold it any longer,
huh?”
Strutter
sympathized.

“Girlfriend, by the time I crossed
the Doylestown city line, I was positively gargling,” May giggled. “As soon as
I got off the highway and onto a secondary road, I pulled over next to the
first clump of trees I saw and hobbled behind one as fast as I could to relieve
myself, Bob or no Bob. By the time I got back, a police cruiser was pulled up
behind the Toyota, and Officer Jerry Katz of the Doylestown P.D. was shining a
flashlight into the back seat and trying to get Bob to explain what he was
doing there. Of course, poor Bob didn’t have any idea in the world where he
was, let alone how he’d gotten there. Then I limped out from behind the trees,
and …” She paused and took another gulp of wine.