Eighteen

TIMES LIKE THESE, STANDING AND SHIVERING ON A SIDEWALK, KNOWING THAT Snuggles and trouble would resume reminiscing and wineglass clicking while I leaked feathers, a person can use a friend. Luckily, I had a usable one only two blocks away.

“Where were you?” she demanded on the intercom after I announced myself. “Come on up!”

When she opened her apartment door, she looked beyond me, down the hallway. “Sasha,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

“Where is she? This isn’t my definition of after school, Mandy. You said three-thirty, not eight P.M. I left a message hours ago. Jeez, I was afraid to leave.” She looked like she had conquered the fear, because along with her black tunic with an enormous white lace collar, black tights, and snakeskin boots, she wore her camera on a black leather strap like a massive lavaliere. But then, you can never judge Sasha’s destination by her ensemble.

“I’m sorry, “I said. “I’ll explain.” And I did. “Of course, she’s innocent,” I said, but with less conviction than I’d had earlier. I’d have felt a lot better if I’d been sure that Lydia was still being unfairly detained. I knew I shouldn’t have stormed out of the restaurant.

Sasha looked concerned. She is always willing to be troubled on my behalf—unless, of course, she is preoccupied with being troubled on her own behalf—which is one reason our friendship has survived seriously different personalities and interests. I wallowed in her sympathy for a moment, then decided to play on it. “Somebody shot at me tonight. Twice.”

She was great. None of Mackenzie’s rational observations. Within one minute, no more, she took the Lord’s name in vain several times and asked for enough details to write a major news story. And not only that, she suggested that there was a silver lining—and it would be on top of my car. The insurance company would probably replace my convertible hood. I was cheered.

“Mackenzie thinks I’m paranoid.” I had no shame. Sasha’s ready to discount anything Mackenzie thinks anyway, and her emotions are always at flood level.

She reacted wonderfully, operatically, cursing him in a manner no English teacher would dare. Then she stood up. “Okay,” she announced to an invisible audience. “Okay, then. We both need a change of scene, so we’re out of here.”

My turn to ask questions, but she said it was a surprise, something new for both of us, and that my coat and body should gather themselves up and follow, because we could walk there.

Outside, it was still bitter cold, still windy, but I was not still alone, which made all the difference. We walked, hunched against the elements, and I described, probably unfairly, my dinner date with the Dixie duo.

“Snuggles!” Sasha shouted in megadecibels. “Snuggles!”

I hoped Mackenzie could hear the hooting.

“Men,” Sasha said, “have an infinite potential for being sickening. I have personally experienced nine million, twelve thousand and seven variations so far, and I suspect I’m only at the beginning of the list.”

I followed her, as requested, dumbly and without question until we stopped in front of a once-grand, slightly down at its baseboards hotel. I fit right in with my lopsided coat—one arm plump and insulated, the other unstuffed and flimsy.

We went through the revolving doors, into a lobby designed with the space-wasting largesse of a dead era.

There was an announcement board which Sasha studied. “This way to the Grand Ballroom.”

I peeked at what was playing there and saw only, NACHPA Festival. “Is that Spanish?” I asked her retreating form.

“Initials,” she said.

“North American Chief Honchos Professional Association?” I guessed. She didn’t whirl around and gasp with admiration. “Non-Agnostic Churches’ Holy Prayer Alliance?” She kept walking. I hurried faster. “Nubile, Adorable, Cute Hustlers, Pros and Amateurs? Netherlands Antilles? New Amsterdam? Neuters, Abstainers, Cold and Hot Potatoes of America? Am I close?”

I wasn’t. We had reached the open double, quadruple doors of an enormous ballroom filled with noise and bodies. I was handed a program for the New Age Festival of Conscious Healing and Personal Actualization.

Well, hey. I’d just read the results of a study that listed the three top desires of visitors to Philadelphia. In order, they were finding a bathroom, visiting the Liberty Bell, and running up the art museum steps like Rocky did. But here were scores of people seeking personal growth, not a toilet.

“Isn’t New Age kind of old now?” I asked over the strains of Muzak played on synthesizer and trilling bells.

“Who are you, the delegate from Trend Central?”

“At least tell me when you joined this crowd,” I grumbled.

“I’m trying it out. This guy I’m seeing said I should. You ever hear of tantric sex?” Her smile was somewhat smug.

“What guy could you possibly be seeing? Didn’t you give up men forever last night? Decide to try clean living?”

She brushed away the suggestion with the back of her hand. “I probably meant I gave up men for last night. And this is part of getting into clean living.” We drifted into the New Age carnival.

Sasha stopped at a booth that insisted upon the universal healing power of mung beans. She listened to the vendor hype legumes, but the whole time her eyes scouted the crowd.

It’s an annoying trait, but she defends it on the grounds that she’s a professional looker, as she puts it, collecting goodies for that lens of hers.

“Quick—stand over there,” Sasha said. This was a familiar ploy. She’d position me near what interested her, then pretend to be taking my picture while she moved the camera slightly and captured somebody else altogether. She snapped once, then adjusted the lens and snapped again.

I caught up to her next to a Breatharian who subsisted completely on air. “I spent a lot of time today at the health food store,” Sasha said. “No more MBAs, no more escargot at La Pomposity.” It seemed cruel to discuss French food in front of a man who wasn’t even connected to the food chain, but Sasha nattered on about organic vegetables and complementary grains. She stood on tiptoe, which made her taller than most of the crowd, and scanned the room. This was extreme behavior, even for her wandering eye.

“What are you looking for?” I asked as we moved on, undoubtedly to the Breatharian’s great relief.

“You think these things actually heal you?” Sasha asked, lifting a watery pink crystal from a display.

The crystal healer looked anxious until the stone was put back in its velvet case and Sasha went en pointe again. “Who?” I asked. But I knew, without her answering. Tantric sex, that was who. New Age or old, Sasha has a good time.

“There he is!” She pointed at a pale, lanky fellow who looked like an outtake from a dour Ingmar Bergman film. There is no accounting for taste, the Breatharian’s or Sasha’s. “Lars,” she said. “I’ll be back.” And she was gone.

I was traveling solo again. Alice in Actualization Land. I passed a jester, two magicians, a lion tamer, a penguin, and an enormous green pepper. Their costumes had a relevance I was too unenlightened to grasp.

A lot of attention, pamphlets, and therapies seemed devoted to dependents and co-, folks addicted to a multitude of things that sounded like fun. There were also globs of healing aimed at the child within, a concept that reminded me of that movie where space creatures incubate inside earthlings, then burst out of their bellies.

It appeared those kids within had heard about emancipation and needed to be freed. I’m all for equal rights, but I’m keeping the child within me in cold storage. For starters, who’d babysit it?

The other pressing problem of our age appeared to be loving too much. I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s possible. I think you can love stupidly, yes. Futilely, yes. But too much, no. I think people who hate too much need the workshops, but maybe I’m missing something.

My workshop of choice would have been what was called belly-goddess-dancing because I liked the costume, the hat with the spire and baggy pants over bare feet, golden coins encircling the waist and forehead. I felt better just thinking about it until I didn’t feel better about anything. Abruptly, my muscles and mind both sagged and remembered that I’d been ready for bed hours ago, when it was still broad daylight.

If I could have found Sasha to say good night, I would have. Instead, I listlessly hung around Booth 419, which at least smelled good. To one side, a humidifier spewed eucalyptus steam, to the other, something grassy and soothing. “Nice,” I murmured, with an uncomfortable sense that the aromas should mean something to me.

A passing woman handed me a flyer hawking a reflexology massage of my feet. “Ten percent off,” she said.

“Does that mean you only do nine toes?”

She flounced on, but was replaced by Sasha. “I keep losing him,” she said, eyes still doing up-periscope maneuvers.

“You sound like a country singer. And I’m awfully tired. I still have the key to your place, so you can stay. I’m sacking out.”

“In a minute—one more pose for me, would you?” she asked. I obliged, like an automaton.

“They shouldn’t allow picture taking in here. It’s not professional-looking.”

The voice carried like all seventy-six trombones, and I turned and saw the fuchsia hair and sausage torso, today in lime Day-Glo casing. And that’s what the eucalyptus steam had meant. “Hey, aromatherapy!” I pushed through the crowd.

“You’re ruining my shot,” Sasha called after me.

But I was in pursuit of the missing link. “Fay!” I shouted. “Mrs. Teller!”

She turned and craned and didn’t seem to spot my raised hand until I was nearly next to her, and then she looked as if she might take flight. Straight up.

She was very short. The twins took after their daddy, I thought, and then wondered at what point I’d accepted Fay’s claims about their paternity.

“Mrs. Teller.” I put out my hand to shake hers.

She pulled away. “The last name’s Elias! Who are you?”

I obviously hadn’t made as strong an impression on her as she had on me. “Amanda Pepper.”

Her chin pushed out pugnaciously. “Why’d you call me that other name?”

“I’m sorry, I thought…the other day, at the Learning Center, you said…” My words dribbled off under the pressure of her peacock-blue squint. “Didn’t you?”

“You were there?”

I nodded. “You told me I was an autumn. You told me about yourself.”

Her lids lowered like Technicolor shades drawn over her eyes. “Me and my big mouth. Who are you and what do you want with me?”

It wasn’t easy explaining what I wanted, since it was to entrap her, find a new suspect, so I fumbled, spluttered, and stumbled until she held up a hand.

“Enough already!” She led me past physical fitnessland. Not the yuppie world of Nautilus machines or weights, cute workout clothes and aerobics. We were surrounded by Birkenstocks, yoga demonstrations, embarrassing testimonials to colonic cleansing, and free samples of peculiar foods. We walked slowly, working toward our real topic while accepting handouts. The tapas had given me indigestion and left me hungry, so I accepted all curative offerings from people whose wardrobes and edibles both were earth-colored. I scarfed sticky make-believe ice cream and tofu-gluten imitation sushi and a wheat-berry burger. I drank ersatz coffee made of obscure plants and munched salt-, sugar-, fat-, and taste-free cookies.

“They could call it Mock Donald’s,” I said. Fay didn’t laugh.

We wound up at a juice bar unpopular enough to have available seats. It was in front of a booth occupied by a woman who channeled an Abyssinian potter.

“I use the name Elias for professional reasons,” Fay said. “So my kids don’t suffer. I am also a body worker, a masseuse—that’s what kept a roof over us. Not the dirty kind, but you know how people are about masseuses. Elias was my maiden name.” She blinked and bit her shiny pink lip. “So my big mouth got me in trouble, did it? All those people at the office heard me.”

A giant carrot-waiter with a ferny green tuft on top and black Nikes at the bottom put a bowl of raw sunflower seeds on the table, handed us each a discount coupon for a juice extractor, and took our orders—guava muskmelon mash for Fay, mint tea for me.

“Listen,” she said as soon as the carrot turned its tuft away. “Bottom line is, the case is already solved, so there’s no reason for further conversation, is there?” Her brassy voice turned whiny and strained at the higher registers.

“I think there is. I think Lydia’s innocent, and I don’t think the case is closed.”

Her face was a map of hard times and places, and the bright colors of her lids, cheeks, and lips like marks of desperation. She blinked hard and her eyes welled. “I didn’t mean for it to end that way.” Her chest puffed with an enormous inhale, which she held for a long time, then let out with a whoosh. “Not for him to die. I only wanted to scare him into doing something. I feel sick with guilt. To cause somebody’s death—his death!” She sniffled.

My God—a holistic confession. Like that. And all I had wanted was a factoid, a clue, a hint. I welcomed the diversion of our drinks, delivered to the table by an orange wait-fruit. “So, um, how did you—how did it happen?” Were there really such things as citizen arrests, or was that strictly comic book stuff? Could I convince her to do the right thing and turn herself in? Or physically coerce her to come with me—and, if so, to where? My car was parked down by the river. I imagined dragging the sausage lady behind me up the steps of a bus, and sighed and sank back in my chair.

She breathed shallowly and rapidly and wiped moisture from the corner of her eye. “Who knows exactly how it happened?” she trumpeted. People passing our table stopped and stared, but Fay was oblivious. “Horrible things happen all the time. Like that.” She snapped two long purple nails together, then she fumbled in her purse, a carpetbag, and pulled out a lace-edged handkerchief and sobbed into it.

It was beyond irony to hear a confession of murder here in the citadel of absolute, optimum, permanent physical, mental, and spiritual wellness.

“I wanted him alive, making money,” Fay said. “I wanted to murder him in court!”

I spotted the law across the way and tried for eye contact. He lounged against a zodiac sign, facing us, but although I winked and raised an eyebrow, inviting him over, he managed not to notice.

“Go on,” I answered Fay between grimaces at the man in blue. “You wanted to use the law.” So did I. I jerked my head and winked at the cop one more time.

“Something in your eye?” Fay asked.

I nodded, and blinked some more, rolling my eyes in the direction of the guard, who had X-ray vision, and therefore looked straight through me. I gave it up. “So tell me about last night.” I tried to keep my voice casual.

Fay busied herself straightening the already-in-place neckline of her green ensemble. “I’m a survivor,” she said. “He already near wrecked my life, and that two-faced no-good isn’t pulling me into the grave after him now!”

Now what was this? A confession that she wasn’t going to confess, after all? We sat in an awkward silence, then I tried to start her up again. I used the magic word. “Men!” I said.

It worked. She nodded. “Left me with tiny little babies. We’d been the two poorest kids working our way through State, but we had big plans. I was studying education, and I had this idea for centers for kids with learning problems, you know?” Her expression had become dreamy and soft, and the young Fay was almost visible under the overbright pigments. Then she pushed out her chin and hardened up. “Only I never got a degree. I got twins instead.” She considered this for a moment, then nodded. “I have to say, he did the decent thing by me.”

“You mean by marrying you?”

She nodded. “Eloped one night to Jersey. A justice of the peace. Only…he was drunk.”

This was the business that concerned the twins, a possible problem with the marriage’s validity. “Lots of grooms are drunk from what I hear,” I said.

“The justice of the peace was drunk, too. And I had morning sickness at night. I don’t know if anybody ever sent in whatever you’re supposed to.” She sighed. “But we were married. Wynn had a job by then. Teaching high school. I thought we were happy. But one morning during spring break, there’s a twenty-dollar bill and a note that says I’ll call. Which he didn’t. Didn’t come back to his job, either. Wrote letters instead. In Ohio, he said he was testing my idea, and that he’d send for us. From New York, he said it was economically unfeasible. He was bankrupt, depressed, desperate. I believed him.

“That postcard ended with Sorry, and it was the last I ever heard. I thought he’d killed himself. All these years, I figure I’m a widow, then I come to this conference and find out he’s famous, making big bucks from my idea! Plus, he’s a bigamist.” She sat back and folded her arms over her puffy breast.

“Jeez, girl, what happened to you? I thought you were kidnapped.” Sasha towered over us, a fleshy escapee from a Shakespearean spoof in her tunic and high boots. “Expected to find your picture on soy milk cans from now on.”

“Sasha Berg, Fay Elias.” Both women nodded at each other with no interest. “Didn’t mean to mess up your picture,” I said, “but I was so excited to see Fay that—”

Just then, Mr. Sighs and Whispers loped over, a shank of straight blond hair carefully draped over his right eye. “You ready, Sasha?” he asked with a disappointing twang. Maybe he was from Midwest Sweden.

Sasha saw something that intrigued her and turned, with her camera up to her eye, and Lars did a stupid double-take in my direction. “Well, well,” he said, “and who is this?” I wonder why men think it’s cute to talk that way. “Why weren’t we introduced? I’m Lars Feldman. I’m an actor.” He pulled out a wrought-iron chair and looked ready to settle down at our table. “And you, pretty lady, are…?”

“Sasha’s best friend,” I said. “I think she needs one.”

“No offense,” Fay said when Lars and Sasha meandered off, “but where does your friend find her clothes?”

“The same secondhand sources she finds her men.” Although Fay, who looked like a fluorescent hot dog, had no right to be a fashion Nazi.

She stuck her index finger through a curl and twirled it while her gaze became distant. Then she put down her hand and shook her head. “Listen, the past is the past. The present is all that matters. I am his widow. Mother of his babies.”

“But about what you said. The…guilt, you know? About his death? That makes a difference.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to be tactless, but frankly, it doesn’t matter if he was a bigamist or not. Given the, um, situation, what you did, you can’t inherit from him. Now, as for Adam and Eve—”

“What’re you talking about?” Her eyes rounded, her mouth made a small scarlet O. “Wait a—you’re saying I killed my own husband?”

That summoned a crowd, even a lady with a placard about chakra cleansing. I leaned close and whispered. “You said so! How guilty you felt about causing his death—you just said so!”

She put a purple-tipped hand to her bosom. “My heart,” she shrieked. “I can’t believe!”

The man in blue, the one I’d been vainly trying to entice, miraculously recovered from his coma and scuttled over. “You all right, miss?” he asked her.

His badge named a security firm, not the police. I had wasted a lot of eye-batting.

“My heart’s going a mile a minute. Whoof!” Fay fanned herself.

The guard looked confused.

“That woman said—” Fay began.

The guard looked annoyed.

“I can’t even repeat such things! If you knew what she said!”

“Your heart’s all right, then?” he asked.

Fay shook herself back in place and looked up at him coquettishly. “She shocked me,” she said.

His face wrinkled in a queasy grin that said “Women!” and he backed off warily.

“Then what on earth was all that guilty talk about?” I asked.

She looked solemn and near tears again. “I didn’t want him to die, and I’m responsible.”

“Look, Fay, this is where I came in.” Maybe this was where I should get out. Join the recovery group for Women Who Sleuth Too Much.

“Wynn did me wrong, and that I don’t forgive, but I never wished him dead.” She looked appalled that the word had come out of her. “But I caused it all the same.”

Her head drooped, her skin sagged, and I had no idea where we were or what was going on.

“Lydia is innocent, like you said. She pulled the trigger, but I was the one drove her crazy, appearing out of the blue, announcing she wasn’t his real wife. I read in the newspaper that she has a history of not being screwed on too tight. I didn’t know, I swear. I shamed her, drove her to it.”

“No, no,” I said. “Lydia did not pull that trigger.”

Fay raised her penciled eyebrows. “Don’t be ridiculous. I have reason to know she was very upset last night. Crazy, all right?”

“I know two of your reasons,” I said. “They accosted me today.”

“My children were there for legitimate purposes. There are millions at stake. Their rightful inheritance.”

“Don’t count on it.” From what I’d heard, the business sounded as unstable as it was unethical, skimming profits, probably hiding them.

Fay recoiled a bit. “Millions,” she insisted. “Although that’s of no real importance to me. I’m more spiritual than the twins.” She lowered her eyes and looked meditative, or perhaps a little disappointed in what she’d bred. Then her head popped back up and she eyed me sharply, belatedly realizing the implications of what she’d said. “Now don’t you dare for one minute think my babies did anything like that!”

She and her enormous babies were getting on my nerves. I risked another fainting fit with a direct question. “You didn’t happen to be out there with them last night, did you?”

She clutched her carpetbag in both hands. “There you go again!”

“All the same, where were you?”

“I was otherwise engaged…by…in a workshop.”

I opened my program. “Come on, Fay, there isn’t a single nighttime workshop.”

“Well, it was a—a different kind. Not scheduled. And—none of your business!” Her cheeks flamed until they matched her hair.

I wondered who he’d been. The Breatharian? One of the carrots? Or had the roll in the tofu really been a trip to the Tellers’? Those fool twins needed guidance to do almost anything.

“The point is,” Fay said, gathering up her carpetbag, “Lydia was pretty nuts last night. Crying and carrying on about her child being pushed out and my children pushing in. Made no sense.”

“The twins told you all this?”

“How else would I know it? We were the final straw for crazy Lydia Teller, and she went over the edge. I’ll die feeling guilty.”

And with enough bad luck, I won’t solve this and I’ll just die. Now, I trusted no one. Lydia had lied, too, saying she’d been locked in a bathroom all night and had no knowledge of visitors. But the twins, or Fay, placed her there with them, engaging in a very visible tantrum. Lydia had lied. There was no way around it.

“He threw out my letters.” Fay’s face sagged with a heavy wistfulness. “He’s a pack rat, but he didn’t keep souvenirs of us. No reminders of who he’d been. I mean he wanted me, if you catch my meaning, but not as a wife. I was an accidental wife to him.” She looked newly sad about it. “He always wanted class. Talked about it as far back as I can remember, when he was no more than a boy. He was going to be somebody special and marry somebody just as special. Like Lydia with her famous parents, like the article said.”

She straightened up as tall as her small torso could manage. “And look where it got him. Or her, for that matter. He left a perfectly good woman and adorable babies so he could wind up with a no-good son and a classy wife who shoots him dead. Serves him right.”

She seemed oblivious to the tears running down her face. Her eyeliner softened into a dark smudge, and her powder showed damp tracks.

“He pushed me around, too,” she said, “like the news said he did to her. But he should have known. You can’t dump on a class act the way you can on me. Well, she showed him, didn’t she?”