Gambino took me to Buffalo to meet his parents. We drove to a matinee of Romeo and Juliet in a beat-up blue Camaro. On our way back to the car we were caught in a sudden downpour, and I offered Gambino’s mother, who was wearing a grass skirt, the umbrella I had been using as a walking stick because I had only one leg. Annie was using the other leg as a hatrack. But the umbrella blew inside out and we all got soaked. Just as we were about to strip down to our skivvies, I woke up to the clap of thunder. What a nightmare. At least I wasn’t the one wearing the grass skirt.
I went to get my robe from the closet and stepped right into a puddle of water. I looked up. The jack-o’-lantern on my ceiling had spread into a Volkswagen Rabbit. Not a very auspicious start to the day. Poor Lael. She’d be frantic about her Labor Day barbecue.
“I knew it was you,” she said, picking up on the first ring. “I’m watching the Weather Channel right now, and it’s good news! The storm is supposed to clear before noon.”
I looked out the rain-spattered window. The sky was as black as coal.
“It’s already clearing on this side of town,” I said. “I think I see some sunlight peeking through the clouds.”
“That’s great! Everybody’s going to mope around all morning and by one o’clock they’ll be ready to put on their swimsuits and chow down on burgers! And I’m making Jell-O molds in honor of Joe Hill and the Wobblies! Union Forever!”
I had to hand it to her. A sunny disposition can carry you through the worst of times.
“So, I have news, Cece. You’ll never guess who’s coming.”
“What?” I couldn’t hear her. Buster was howling. He was afraid of thunder. I headed to the kitchen, thinking I’d distract him with food.
“I said, you’ll never guess who’s coming to the barbecue.”
“Who?” I asked, hoisting the bag of kibble.
“Your daughter, your son-in-law, your son-in-law’s girlfriend, and their little boy.”
The kibble went all over the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. Annie called last night and asked if I’d mind, and of course I said it was fine.”
“You should’ve said no, Lael!”
“Why?”
“Annie is trying to play matchmaker. Does she really need to bring those two together?”
“Maybe they should be together.”
“Vincent should be with Annie. They love each other.”
“And what about Vincent’s son?”
“Lael, you of all people should know that the nuclear family isn’t the only option.”
“I never know how to take your comments. Are you trying to piss me off?”
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“How about you don’t say anything, and trust those around you, feeble as they may be, to work out their own lives! Try that, Cece, why don’t you?”
She hung up. And I hadn’t even had time to tell her that Gambino was going to be my date. I got the broom and started sweeping up the little bone-shaped pieces of kibble. I must’ve been hungry, because they smelled good.
Once she got over being mad, Lael was going to be happy about Gambino. She liked him. He’d come to one of her barbecues a few years back, when we were first dating. Late in the afternoon, she’d been poking around behind the garage looking for some starter fluid when she’d caught Tommy and one of his friends smoking a joint. She’d sent the friend home and begged Gambino to haul Tommy off in handcuffs, to teach him a lesson, but Gambino took him for a long walk instead. To this day, neither of us has any idea what he said to the kid, but it was the last time Tommy ever got into trouble.
I finished cleaning up. I wouldn’t have bothered, but it was that or work. Now I had no choice. I put on my slippers, grabbed an umbrella, and was about to dash out to the office when I remembered that I always have my best ideas in the shower. I draped a towel over the shower door and put a fresh legal pad and a pencil on the sink, within easy reach. I’d learned through bitter experience that mnemonic devices are not to be trusted.
The hot water beat down on my back. It was heavenly. I didn’t want to think about the Albaccos and oil rigs and murder. I wanted to think about Gambino and the cleansing rays of the sun and piña coladas. I daydreamed until I got to the cream rinse stage. Gambino and I were under a palm tree, eating guacamole and laughing. I daydreamed a little more. But I really did need to pumice my heels.
Usually I time it perfectly, but I was off by a couple of minutes today so I wound up shaving my legs in ice-cold water. Shivering, I draped another towel over my pillow and lay down carefully, so as not to get my jojoba-infused hair-restructuring gel all over the bed. Mimi sniffed me curiously, but she was enamored of kibble, not plant extracts.
So enough with the guacamole. I propped my legal pad up on my lap. Back to the matter at hand. What did Jean have on Morgan Allan?
Jean knew about his stooge in the legislature, but that wasn’t enough. It was bad, but not bad enough to destroy a man like Morgan. She had to have known more. The really damning bit was the partnership agreement with Joe’s father. Joe’s father should’ve shared in Morgan’s billions. Equally. It had to be that. Jean had to have known. That would have been enough to make Morgan sweat, enough to have made him pay her, week after week, month after month, enough to have made him realize that if he was ever going to be rid of her he’d have to kill her. But how could Jean have known when her husband, Joe Albacco Sr.’s own son, had no idea whatsoever? Why didn’t she tell him? Wouldn’t she have wanted all that money for herself?
I grabbed the phone to call Father Herlihy. While I waited, he found Joe. Chaplains, I’d discovered, have a lot of pull.
After about five minutes, Joe got on the line. We exchanged a few pleasantries. He asked how I was. I asked how he was. It was all so weirdly civil.
“I’m nervous about my parole hearing on Monday,” he said finally. I tried not to hear the expectant note in his voice.
“Listen, Mr. Albacco. There’s a lot you don’t know, and I’m not sure where to begin.”
“I can’t talk long, Ms. Caruso. I work all day Saturdays.”
“Well, then, here it is. Meredith’s father and your father were business partners, and Morgan cheated your father out of billions of dollars.”
He started to laugh. It did sound sort of implausible.
“Listen to me. What I’m trying to say is, when you get out of jail, you are going to be an extremely wealthy man.”
“Hey, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but this garbage isn’t what I hoped to be hearing from you.”
“Hey, I don’t want to be rude, either, but don’t you dare talk to me about garbage!”
“Excuse me?”
I paused a beat. “Erle Stanley Gardner never called you, did he?”
He didn’t say anything.
“No, I didn’t think he did. Why are you so quiet? Why don’t you say something?”
“I knew you were smart, Ms. Caruso.”
“Oh, I’m not half as smart as you are.”
“I’m not smart. Look, I didn’t mean to lie.”
“You didn’t mean to lie? That’s pathetic!”
“Come off it. You and I both know you’d have never started all this up without the right reason. Would you have looked into my case if I were just another unanswered letter to the Court of Last Resort? Would you?”
“I suppose not.”
“So how’d you know he never called me?”
“ESG’s history with your family goes way back. He couldn’t have gone as far as you said without remembering your name. He would’ve remembered that he had set up the original partnership agreement between your father and Morgan Allan.”
“What partnership agreement? You keep dreaming this stuff up. My father was a loser, I told you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I believe you. I have no idea why, considering how you’ve jerked me around, but I believe you. You didn’t know anything about this. But your wife sure as hell did.”
“What are you going on about? How?”
“That’s what I want to find out. Were she and your mother close?”
“No, Jean only met her once. My mother got sick after that and died very quickly. It was lung cancer. It had spread all over her body. She was in terrible pain. Jean helped me a lot after that.”
“How did she help you exactly?”
“I wasn’t good for much. Jean was just a kid herself. But she helped with all the arrangements, emptying out the house, everything. She was amazing.”
That she was. Someone like Jean would know just how to empty out a house. What to keep and what to throw away. She must’ve found something in that house that tipped her off. Something neither Joe nor his mother even realized they had. And she knew just what to do with it.
I told Joe I’d see him at the parole hearing Monday morning. After I hung up, I looked out the window. The sky was blue, as if it had never been otherwise. I rinsed out my hair and decided to let it air-dry. I was going for sexy and tousled and vowed not to look in the mirror until bedtime for fear of encountering evidence to the contrary. I stuffed my bathing suit into an old beach bag, pulled on my jeans and a striped T-shirt, and sat on the couch waiting for Gambino. But that wasn’t such a good idea. He wasn’t coming for hours. So I picked up The Case of the Glamorous Ghost.
I was about halfway through. The main characters were Perry’s spectral client, Eleanor Corbin, an exhibitionist, opportunist, and liar, and Olga Corbin Jordan, the well-heeled, well-groomed half sister of the ghost. Poor Olga was scandalized because Eleanor appeared to be involved not just in naked dancing in the park, which was bad enough, but illegal gems and narcotics.
Families. I had been thinking about them a lot lately, and they were all scary, every last one of them. Eleanor and Olga. Murderous Morgan Allan, his spooky daughter, Meredith, and her son, Burnett. Joe the liar and his dead wife, Jean, who thought it would be fun to blackmail her sister’s lesbian lover, among others. There was Ellie, who was afraid her daughter would find out about her past, and the Winters clan: a cheating legislator, a fix-it son, and a screwup grandson. Then there was my family—my mother, who could still wound me with a word; my father, who had died before I could prove myself to him; and my daughter, who regarded me as superfluous. What did Tolstoy say? Happy families are all alike. Unhappy ones are each unhappy in their own way.
Lael’s barbecues were like that, come to think of it, each its own unique species of disaster. I hoped this year’s would be the one we’d all forget. That it would be blissfully uneventful. That the highlight of the afternoon would be one of the children catching sight of a rainbow. That we’d eat, drink, and go home to our wide-screen TVs, those of us who have wide-screen TVs, that is. You never can tell.