Partners In Crime (12 page)

"I'll be glad to be bartender if you'll do
the mixing," he offered.

"In that case, I'll be glad to do the
cooking if you'll do the dishes." The elevator doors closed on her
merry laugh and he was left to salute an empty lobby, already
conscious of the lack of Auntie Lil's lively and invigorating
company.

The brunch had been scheduled for 10:00
A.M., despite the severe protests of Auntie Lil, who considered any
time before noon absolutely barbaric. However, Sheila had indicated
she had important plans for later in the day and would prefer to
come over following church. T.S. knew it was her usual practice to
attend early mass at Our Lady of the Sorrows with her mother each
Sunday and he didn't want to interfere. She could probably use the
religion this week in particular, he reasoned, after coming face to
face, literally, with death.

Besides, while Sheila was on her knees
praying, T.S. would be on his knees cleaning. For a woman with such
an orderly mind, Auntie Lil had a remarkably chaotic home. It was a
typical middle-class Queens apartment building on the outside—an
anonymous, all brick design—but on the inside, Auntie Lil's
apartment looked as if someone had tried to store six decades of
outdated Smithsonian exhibits in four small rooms. Shelves and
tables were crammed everywhere, and every surface overflowed with
carved figurines, music boxes, antique cosmetic cases, bits of
costumes and scraps of patterns, ashtrays from every hotel between
New York and San Francisco, at least ten pairs of scissors, opened
and unopened boxes of crackers and cookies, and handfuls of notes
first written as reminders and then promptly forgotten. He found
one note, stuffed in a vase, dated over a year ago: "Pick up Santa
suit from dry cleaners." He wondered if it had been retrieved yet,
but wasted no further time trying to decipher what Auntie Lil was
doing with a Santa suit. It made his brain hurt to even consider
the possibilities.

To compound the confusion
and, he suspected, eliminate any question of engaging a cleaning
woman, Auntie Lil purposefully stored her most precious possessions
side by side with flea market junk, declaring that she liked all
equally and labeling him a snob when he protested. In the living
room, a collection of exquisite vases had been shoved to the rear
of a cupboard to make way for a large bowling trophy she had found
on the street and decided she liked. In the bedroom, she'd filled a
valuable pewter commode from the 1700's with thousands of poker
pennies. This same democratic policy applied to her books: they
were stored in haphazard piles along the hallway wall, hardback and
paperback teetering together, first editions of Poe buried
under
Reader's Digest
condensed book collections from the 1950's.

But Auntie Lil did not really collect
objects. As was to be expected of someone so exquisitely nosy, she
preferred to collect people instead, displaying her favorites in
dozens of framed photographs that dangled precariously from her
walls. Captured moments of Auntie Lil smiling with African kings,
gripping the hand of a former prime minister of Japan, and posing
with a group of somber German businessmen were interspersed among
photos of more common faces snapped during one of the many trips
she'd made over her lifetime. One of her favorites was from several
decades before: she was posed atop a large pile of discarded tires,
next to an entire family of broad-faced strangers who ran a
junkyard outside of Vancouver. She could no longer even remember
their names, as was the case with many of the photos, but she still
cherished their faces and, T.S. presumed, the memories they
represented.

Her furniture consisted of a jumbled mixture
of various antiques and period styles given to her as gifts by
grateful employers and a life's worth of admirers. She had a
tendency to obscure the beauty of these pieces by draping bolts of
fabric over her tables, chairs and couch, perhaps because it made
her feel more at home after so many years in design showrooms. But
working in haute couture had apparently had little effect on her
sense of aesthetics. Heavy brocades were piled indiscriminately on
top of cheery ginghams, creating a cacophony of pattern and
color.

The only place in the entire apartment that
displayed any semblance of discipline was Auntie Lil's clothes
closet. It was meticulously organized. Coordinated outfits, mostly
pants suits, hung in color groups subdivided by fabric. Her jewelry
and shoes dangled from special racks inset into the door, a system
T.S. had so admired he'd duplicated it in his own, far neater,
apartment.

Unfortunately, Anne Marie and Sheila would
not be spending their time in Auntie Lil's closet. Which meant that
there was plenty for T.S. to do before they arrived. There was
little he could accomplish in terms of fundamental organization,
and he had long since learned that it was futile to try and change
Auntie Lil's habits. But he could at least make a quick pass at
surface sanitation. He spent the hour before the brunch folding up
odds and ends of cloth, which, by long practice, he knew fit under
her bed. As he worked, he could hear Auntie Lil clattering and
singing in the kitchen, drowning out the sounds of his cleaning, he
suspected, to avoid feeling guilty.

He dusted the surfaces of dozens of
photographs, rearranged her shelves as best he could and
essentially shoveled out the living room, banishing its treasured
debris to the far side of her bed. When he was done, he vacuumed
the cozy space he had created, noticing, to his surprise, that her
sofa was white. He could have sworn it was flowered, but perhaps
that had simply been a favored bolt of cloth. If Sheila or her
mother asked for a tour, the game was up. But T.S. suspected they
were both astute enough to know not to push their luck and probably
too polite to pry.

They rang Auntie Lil's buzzer promptly at
10:00. T.S. welcomed them into the apartment with a bow. Anne Marie
sailed past, regally dressed in a gray suit that almost shimmered
as she walked—the finest of Sunday finery. Not that she was ever
dowdy. She was still a striking woman, even in her fifties, small
with the dark Irish coloring seldom seen unadulterated anymore. Her
skin was a pale porcelain but her eyes and brows were nearly black.
Her hair retained a glossy ebony shine, no doubt with a little help
from Clairol at this point in her life.

Sheila, on the other hand, looked as if she
had seen far better days. She was distinctly crowded in Auntie
Lil's cluttered apartment and towered over her delicate mother with
all the grace of a robot. Her short blonde hair had been
unsuccessfully combed: small clumps sprouted from the back of her
head like tiny haystacks beneath a tattered knit hat that looked as
if it had been discarded by a lumberjack. Even Sheila's green eyes
seemed murkier than usual. They gazed at T.S. in resigned agony,
rimmed with red and a barely perceptible crust of old makeup she
had failed to remove from the night before.

"Enter, ladies," T.S. said, completing his
exaggerated bow.

"Hello, Mr. Hubbert," Sheila said woodenly,
pulling off her knit hat and shaking her head vigorously. Drizzle
flew about the apartment and Anne Marie rolled her eyes.

"Really, Sheila. You act like a Labrador
retriever sometimes." Her mother pulled off her gloves in rapid,
ladylike movements and draped them over T.S.'s outstretched arm as
she sashayed by. She had certainly regained her composure since the
murder and elected to sit right smack in the middle of Auntie Lil's
white sofa, her gray silk suit a muted contrast to the snowy tones
surrounding her. Sheila had managed to throw on the black-and-green
print dress that she usually dragged out on Mondays when she was
too tired to pick out anything else.

Purple circles beneath Sheila's eyes gave
her away. "And how has your weekend been so far, Ms. O'Reilly?"
T.S. asked innocently. Anne Marie appeared not to notice, instead
carefully noting every detail of Auntie Lil's decor. She smoothed
the skirt of her suit repeatedly, listening absently as T.S. teased
her daughter.

"I feel awful," Sheila muttered back. "Too
many drinks last night."

T.S. rubbed his hands in what he felt was a
courtly manner. "Ah, yes. Drinks. Who would like one of Auntie
Lil's famous Bloody Marys?" He directed the question to Anne Marie
but did not miss the shudder that passed over Sheila's face.

"Perhaps it's a little early for you,
Sheila," he suggested tactfully.

"Perhaps," she echoed faintly. "I believe
I'll start with a ginger ale."

"A Bloody Mary sounds like just the thing,"
Anne Marie said cheerfully. "I've been through quite an ordeal."
Although her coloring was even paler than usual, the excitement had
caused her dark eyes to sparkle even more. They glittered in their
depths and he was startled at the intensity. She looked almost as
if she were enjoying the tragic break in her normal routine.

"Good morning, ladies!" This exuberant cry
came from Auntie Lil, who popped in from the kitchen looking like a
demented and overgrown Tinkerbell. She wore a pale pink jumpsuit
covered with an enormous frilly white apron. A large bow tied it
all together just above her butt and poked out on each side. She
peered happily at Sheila and took in Anne Marie's suit in one
professional glance, blinking slightly before turning her cheerful
gaze back to Sheila. "How are you today, dear?" she asked.

Sheila stared at the apron, struck dumb by
the sight, but Anne Marie rose to the occasion. "How lovely you
look, Auntie Lil," she said, springing over to kiss her cheek. "It
was very kind of you to invite us to tea. My husband pulled duty
today, you know, and I would have been left all alone in that great
big house."

Anne Marie had the disconcerting habit of
talking in a rather breathless manner in social situations but
reverting to the clipped, efficient tones of a drill sergeant when
on duty as a secretary. Today, she elected to use her social voice
and the girlish tone was at odds with her more mature
appearance.

"I thought it was a bad time for you to be
alone," Auntie Lil told Anne Marie, waving her spatula about as if
it were a magic wand. "It's important to talk about these things,
so they don't just prey on your mind."

Before anyone could reply to this, she
disappeared back into the kitchen. T.S. wondered just who was
preying on whom and fetched the pitcher of Bloody Marys.

Auntie Lil had been very specific about the
order of events and had instructed T.S. to ply Anne Marie with at
least three Bloody Marys before bringing up the topic of the
murder. Brunch would be timed to occur near the end of her fourth
Bloody Mary and T.S. was to leave the important questioning to
Auntie Lil during the meal. It was a huge amount of liquor for a
normal woman but, as Auntie Lil reminded her nephew, Anne Marie
grew up in a fiercely Irish home and was no stranger to
alcohol.

As Auntie Lil clanged about the kitchen,
T.S. chatted with Anne Marie about all the fascinating topics he
had long ago learned to explore with the automatic pilot portion of
his brain. She sipped her drinks happily, even taking them with her
on her frequent trips to the bathroom, and seemed unaware that she
was rapidly consuming an unwise amount of alcohol. Each drink
heightened the gleam in her eyes and encouraged her enthusiasm for
conversation. Twin orbs of red spread over her porcelain cheeks,
lending a girlish prettiness to her face.

Feeling something like a rat, T.S. refreshed
her drink for the fourth time and asked her how she was recovering
after the terrible events of Friday.

She needed little prompting and launched
into a long and detailed description of her discovery of the body,
a story familiar to T.S. by now. But in her version, Sheila had
been the one who grew quite upset, while Anne Marie had been the
one to calm her down and instruct her on what to do. At this part
in her mother's story, Sheila rolled her eyes and requested a
Bloody Mary after all. A few sips into the hair of the dog, she,
too, relaxed and sat patiently through her mother's version.

The clanging and banging in the kitchen grew
louder. T.S. was alarmed. Auntie Lil was not the worid's best cook
and there was no telling what would end up on the table. Finally,
however, he caught on that the noise was a signal. Untangling
himself from Auntie Lil's overstuffed armchair, he announced that
brunch was served.

He led the way into a small narrow dining
area that divided the living room from the kitchen. A sideboard
against one wall held exquisite china from Hong Kong, brought back
to Auntie Lil by a grateful designer in the 1930's. Auntie Lil had
arranged the table beautifully with linen, silver and a huge
bouquet of flowers, creating an air of elegance calculated to
impress Anne Marie. T.S. made a show of insisting their guest sit
in the place of honor. The three of them sipped their Bloody Marys
and waited for Auntie Lil, T.S. with a trepidation learned from
previous meals and the two women with benign innocence.

He should not have worried. Auntie Lil had
spent the time in the kitchen well and now marched back and forth
with great fanfare, producing platters of crispy waffles and
strawberries, an obscene amount of bacon—his heart constricted at
the very thought—eggs scrambled with peppers and onions, fruit
salad, a pitcher of fresh orange juice and a pot of fresh coffee.
Grateful his duties were largely over, T.S. dug in with a gusto
matched only by Sheila's. Amazingly enough, the hangover appeared
not to affect her appetite for food, and the two of them gobbled
happily while Auntie Lil skillfully guided her guest's
narration.

"It's really very puzzling that someone
would kill Robert Cheswick," Auntie Lil said, spooning strawberries
on top of Anne Marie's waffle. "Don't you agree?"