Eleven

Mackenzie found me in his car. “How do you feel?” he asked, sliding in behind the wheel.

“No problem. Fine. I’m just fine.” It somehow felt necessary, as a deputy, to play Brunhild the brave, to be professional about this, the way he was.

Mackenzie became very businesslike, carefully maneuvering the car into the swollen Friday-afternoon traffic.

“So, ah, tell me,” I managed. “What did you guys decide up there?”

His voice was clinical. “Well, without tests to verify anything, he appears to have been burned on the face and hands and then bludgeoned. The back of his neck also looks burned as well as beaten. Burns were to stun him, most likely. First, with boiling water on the face. Hands burned trying to shield himself. Then with the kettle on the back of the neck. Maybe also a skillet that was in the sink. It had blood on it, apparently.”

My stomach heaved.

We left the rows of neat red-brick houses, driving into and through a ragged wing of Fairmount Park. Once I could no longer see the lines of stores and houses, I felt able to speak.

C.K. stared at the road, his eyes at their usual half-mast. We approached the shopping center at the SEPTA terminal. Mackenzie cut around corners, passed a few acres of slumbering buses, and placed us smack in the center of a traffic jam. “Damn strike,” he said.

Horns honked furiously and futilely all around us. “Come on, Mandy,” he said. “Give me something to listen to besides these horns and this nonmusic and my own escalatin’ blood pressure. Talk about what’s upsettin’ you.”

“I can’t. All I want to do is avoid it, get past it. I have a better idea if you’re suddenly in the mood for self-revelation. How about if you stop hiding behind your initials?”

He looked at me as if I were mildly amusing, then paid attention to the traffic jam again. Two cars in one of the converging lanes managed to get through a light. We inched forward and waited again.

“I don’t care about your name. Not really. But is it Claude? I would understand avoiding Claude.”

“No, and it isn’t Rumpelstiltskin, either. Why don’t you think of C.K. as a name? Kind of Indian-sounding, isn’t it? Seekay. Why does it concern you so much?”

“Why do my private thoughts and fears concern you so much?”

“Because—”

“And aren’t they obvious, anyway? I’m the one in the middle. That’s what Eddie said to me. Now I understand. Liza saw Eddie, then Liza saw me. Then Liza got killed. Then Eddie saw me. Then Eddie got killed. I’m left, and I’m scared. It doesn’t matter if I know anything. Somebody thinks I do. Somebody thought Eddie did. Somebody was searching for something in that apartment, and I don’t know what it was or if they found it. I hope like hell they did, that accounts are settled. But I can’t believe in it. And anybody who’s already killed twice, to amend your theory, won’t quibble about a third murder, will he? I’m scared, Mackenzie. I’m really scared.”

“Of course you are. You’re gutsy, but not so oblivious as to be insane. We have a real problem here.”

We. The little word blanketed and coddled me. I no longer felt like a target, alone on an enormous field. Mackenzie smiled and nodded.

“Keeping you safe’s my job and my preference,” he said quietly.

As he spoke, we made it through the intersection at last, and I felt released from a terrible pressure. I also felt that the two of us had just passed a personal landmark, and a covenant had been made, a promise between us. I was now pulsing and trembling from a schizy mix of anxiety and pleasurable anticipation of my dual-purpose escort.

We drove into the city, past rows of boarded-up stores, Laundromats, bars, and discount shoe shops. Mackenzie did a smooth slalom around the iron supports of the elevated lines on Market Street.

“I’m exhausted,” I said. I had relaxed all the way into near coma.

“Can you hold up awhile longer? I have to make a stop and then, well, I owe you a night on the town, don’t I? Didn’t we have a delayed date? For your mother’s sake? How about dinner?” He finally looked over at me and opened his overlarge smile that erased the sleepy hayseed and replaced it with—I don’t know what. Something more intriguing.

I smiled and settled back, feeling infinitely better. I would have personal police protection for a while longer. Besides, his expression had reminded me that no matter what was true of the bodies I’d found, mine was still in working order.

We turned left and were back in the neighborhood of old homes fronted with wide porches. He stopped in front of the one with the broken green railing. “Stick around,” he said casually.

I wasn’t sure if he meant I should stay alive or hang on to his jacket. I chose to do both. I opened the car door to accompany him.

He looked surprised, so he’d obviously been speaking metaphorically, but I wasn’t into figures of speech just then, and I wasn’t into being alone. “It won’t be pleasant,” he said. “No matter how she felt about him. It’s never easy.”

It wasn’t. First, she eyed us through a half-open door.

“He’s no good,” she said. A television blared away inside. “I don’t care what trouble he’s in. I have enough trouble from him already.”

“It isn’t about that, ma’am. Not that way.” Somehow, Mackenzie had the ability to be heard over Sesame Street, even while murmuring.

She let us in. Really, she let him in, eyeing me with overt hostility.

Mackenzie took her into the kitchen, and I eased into an overstuffed chair near the TV. “A-B-C-D-D-D-” the set shouted. The kids were mesmerized, which was just as well. They didn’t hear Catherine Bayer cry out and moan. They didn’t look up when she walked back into the room. She started toward them, then turned and sank onto a worn sofa, a slab of foam on what looked like a door with legs. She shook her head in a silent no.

“I never thought,” she said, still shaking. “I mean, trouble, yes, but I didn’t mean that kind of trouble. Not to be…murdered? His head? You said they hurt his head?”

When Mackenzie nodded, she broke into sobs, muffling them into the hard wedge that backed the couch. “I don’t know why I carry on like this,” she said, wiping her nose with her hand. I offered her a pack of tissues, and she took it without looking at me. She blew her nose loudly. The children stared at the set.

“His face,” she said, and she sighed deeply. The head shaking never stopped. “It was the whole problem. The reason for all his troubles. He was so good-looking. Women liked him.”

I hoped Mackenzie wouldn’t speed up her grief so that he could ask questions. He didn’t. He pulled a chipped chair out from the dining room and straddled it. I had a vision of him sitting in an endless succession of chairs, their backs shields against an ongoing chorus of crying women.

“Why?” the woman asked. “Why now? He was so excited about the future. Why now?”

“What was he excited about?” Mackenzie spoke casually.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. See, he didn’t pay support. We aren’t legally separated. No papers or anything.” She began the head shaking again and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

“But something happened recently?” Mackenzie prompted.

She shrugged. “I don’t know what it was. But see, I had gone to the shop, the bakery, to complain. I can’t get a job. I don’t know anything to do that pays more than getting somebody to watch the kids costs. I needed money. So I went there with the kids last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Ed said he didn’t have anything to give me. I got angry. How am I supposed to live? I said I was calling the cops. He practically threw me out, said his boss would fire him if I made scenes, and then where would we be?”

She paused, sighed, pleated the fabric of her blouse, and took a while to relive the ugly scene. “But Monday,” she continued, “Monday afternoon he came here and said everything was going to be different. He gave me a hundred dollars his boss had given him. He said it was only the beginning. That there would be a lot more.”

“Did he say where he was going to get the money?” Mackenzie kept his voice low and distant, like someone who was only casually interested. I wondered if the baker had told him about the mother lode and Eddie’s manic mood.

Mrs. Bayer shook her head even more vigorously. “We fought about it. I was sure it was from something wrong, that something would go wrong with it. It always does. He’s had horses, movie contracts, deals. Always something. But, at least, those times he’d tell me what it was. Monday he wouldn’t say where it would come from, only that it would be a lot. So I knew it was something really wrong.”

She pulled the edges of her exhausted tissue, then bunched it up and pushed it into her pocket. “So,” she said, “we had another fight and I kicked him out. Told him to go to his girl. There was always a girl. Let her put up with him, not me. And I never saw him again. Not even Wednesday, his birthday. We had a cake for him. He said he’d be by.”

I knew where he’d been Wednesday. That was the night I visited the Playhouse. I remembered Eddie’s friend, the man who’d talked about a party, about how Eddie stayed so young. And Eddie had invited me, a complete stranger, to join that birthday party, while his children and wife waited here with their cake.

Sesame Street wound down. “I’m hungry,” the little boy said. “What’s dinner?”

Either they had gone blind watching TV, or the sight of their mother crying was familiar enough to make no impression. “Maaaaa, what can I eat?” Doreen, product but not inheritor of Eddie’s good looks, was a whiner.

Catherine Bayer stared at her children as if they were extraterrestrials. Then she turned her head this way and that, back and forth from Mackenzie to me. “What am I going to do?” she asked, her voice hollow.

“Mom?” the little boy asked.

She gave a wrenching sigh. “I don’t know anything more.” She rose and walked to the door, opening it as if it were made of lead. “I have to start taking care of things,” she added dully.

* * *

We drove through the thick dusk silently. The morning, this exciting morning, when I’d “solved” the mystery, realized who the bear was, had happened to somebody else, in prehistoric times. Even the air was exhausted. The sky had collapsed and was lying soggily on the hood of the car. I felt worn and soiled.

“Mackenzie, is that dinner date for real?”

He nodded. He was not a master of small talk, but he was my protector, and that made up for a lot.

“Okay, then. But first I’d like to pick up my car, go home, shower, and have a drink before dinner. And I’d like you to join me. In the house and the drink. Not the shower.”

For once, he followed directions.

* * *

Maybe it was immoral in the light of the day’s events, but with Mackenzie guarding my hearth downstairs and a fast, hot spray pelting me upstairs, I began to feel like one of those singing soap ads. I slathered suds hither and yon, checking for missing parts. I was still all there.

I put on fresh makeup, perfume, and a peach silk blouse that makes my skin look dewy and my hair burnished. I left the two top buttons open. I chose a soft woolen skirt that swings niftily when I move and went downstairs to rejoin the resident detective.

“You’re a miracle of regeneration,” he said. He had already poured himself a glass of wine and he was reclining, somewhat possessively, in the room he’d analyzed so offensively. But that had been a very long time ago.

I got the jug of wine out of the refrigerator and poured myself a glass and settled beside him. I looked longingly at the empty pottery ashtray on the coffee table. It was close to the perfect moment for a lazy smoke, but there wasn’t even a two-puff stub around to cheat with.

Mackenzie was not into the spirit of things. At least not into my interpretation. He seemed coiled and tense. He swirled the wine around and stared at it, forgetting to make a caustic remark about its vintage; then he sipped with an abstracted air. Maybe I should have rushed things more and invited him to share my shower, too.

I sighed and lounged, and he responded by gazing at my ceiling. I sighed again. He looked at his watch. “You mind?” he mumbled, all the while heaving himself up and flicking on the television.

“Negotiations continue on the transit strike, and a spokesman for the drivers said a settlement is possible if management will agree to….”

I didn’t want to hear about the strike, about traffic choking the Schuylkill Expressway, or about what Mackenzie was waiting for. “Why play it all over again?” I asked, but he shrugged and kept on staring.

“…body of thirty-year-old actor Eddie Bayer found in his Overbrook Park apartment this afternoon, an apparent homicide victim. No leads have been…” I poured more wine. “The Philadelphia Playhouse announces cancellation of this evening’s performance. All tickets will be refunded.”

I remembered the minicamera, and like Mackenzie, I, too, focused on the set. The camera panned the crowd outside the building. And then it paused on an impossibly haggard me, deep in conversation with the little baker.

“Well, at least they didn’t give my name,” I said.

“I asked them not to.” Mackenzie clicked off the set and returned to his silent meditations. This was not the evening I had primed for upstairs. My favorite blouse, my most expensive perfume, were going to waste. Four seconds before I was going to call the paramedics to resuscitate him, Mackenzie shifted position on the sofa.

“Hey,” I said forcefully, remembering a topic that was sure to annoy him into attention, “I’ve got it, you’re Chester, right? So here’s to you, Chester K. Mackenzie, the life of the party.”

He was my least alert gentleman caller since drunk Richard Whitney passed out on my mother’s shag rug in eleventh grade. This one stared at me, then yawned very intently. “It isn’t Chester,” he said finally.

He scratched his ear, where an errant curl must have been tickling him, and looked at me with distant curiosity. I wondered how the man could send out such clear and sensual signals, and then just lose it altogether. Or had I made up a subtext to what he had been saying?

I didn’t feel clever or creative enough to figure out where we had wandered or how to bring us back. I began to slump in unconscious imitation of Mackenzie. I watched him ruminate. From time to time, his coma was interrupted as he studied his notebook.

“Come on, Mackenzie,” I finally said, “can’t you stop detecting for a while? Aren’t you burned out? It’s time for dinner.” Surely he hadn’t lost that appetite, too. “Time for being people,” I added. “Want to try it? Or anything?” The last sort of popped out.

He stood up, unwinding himself until he was his full, slouchy height. He allowed a hint of his great white smile.

“Sorry. I can’t seem to get off it yet. I’ll try. I’ll try.” He went into the kitchen area and poured himself a second glass of wine. One of the many small acts that had erased the D.J. from my life was his instant paralysis when he required sustenance. “Oh, boy,” he’d say, “could I go for a cup of coffee.” But he never did. What he meant was “Could I wait for a cup of coffee. You go.” Now Mackenzie was definitely less verbal than the disc jockey, but he wasn’t into precious helplessness, and if you’re single long enough, you learn to cherish small miracles.

Just as we were beginning something resembling human interaction, the phone rang. I sometimes wish I’d lived out my days before that smart-ass Bell let everybody intrude on everybody else at whim.

Mackenzie lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said. Then he held it out for me. “It’s for you.” He seemed surprised.

I glanced at the clock. Six forty-five. Cheap-call time, and good old guess-who was taking advantage of economy pestering time. It was not her habit to call more than once a week, but then it was not my habit to stumble over corpses often, either, so I couldn’t begrudge her concern. Only her timing.

“Hello, Mother.” I waited. A man had answered, after all.

“My…date, Mom. We’re getting ready to leave for dinner. Yes, the same one. Mackenzie. That’s his last name. His first name is…Chuck.”

Mackenzie sprang to attention. “Chuck!” he said with so much incredulity and annoyance I was sure I had hit it. “Chuck!”

My mother decided that Chuck was an acceptable first name in her book. Obviously, all was well with me. I had a date with a man with a first and last name.

I watched Mackenzie take out his ratty notebook again, still trying to make his scribbles merge into a coherent whole. For the moment, my mother was more interesting than he was.

“What’s the matter with Herman?” I asked, interrupting a long, solemn windup. “He’s bald? Mom, that’s the funniest—”

I pulled the receiver away from my ear to deflect a short series of indignant screeches. “Mother,” I finally said, “I do not consider him my little brother.”

Mackenzie looked up from his notebook.

“Let Daddy and Herman work it out, then. But if the doctor said…okay, then skip ball games. Let him watch soap operas.”

Mackenzie closed his notebook.

“Mom, Chuckie’s waiting for me.” Magic words. She paused, weighing Chuck against bald Herman. “Mother, dear,” I said to speed things to a conclusion, “it’s not fair to make Herman live in the bathroom. No wonder he’s depressed.”

Mackenzie’s eyes were no longer droopy.

Mother gave up. She was stranded a thousand miles to the south, left to deal with her tragedy alone.

Mackenzie looked at me with new interest as I returned to his side. “I give up,” he said. “Talk about skeletons in the closet. Your brother lives in a bathroom?”

He was alert, alive. Cute. Emitting those rays again. My mother had saved the day. “I’ll explain, Mackenzie, if you swear you’ll retire from detecting for a while.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“And first, you’ll have to understand that the woman on the phone cannot conceivably be my true genetic mother. She is an eccentric who picked me out from Rent-A-Child, and that entitles her to unlimited phone calls once the rates are down.”

“And Herman? He’s no relation, either?”

“Are you ready, Clyde?” He didn’t even flinch. What the hell did that C stand for? “Herman is my mother’s parrot.”

“She called him your little brother?”

“She can’t figure out how to make me feel involved in his destiny, guilty about his mental health and happiness, but she tries. Constantly. At one point, she tried insisting that he was an endangered species, but that didn’t do it. Now he’s my sibling.”

“Hold it—Herman’s a bald parrot?” He laughed.

“Yes. He’s pulled out all his lovely green feathers.”

“God, but that’s sad,” he said.

“They have been to the best doctor in Miami. A specialist, no less. After all, we have not only a nude parrot, but a messy, feathery bathroom floor.”

“Ah, yes. And why does he live in the bathroom?”

“Because my father hates him, and it’s a small apartment. He started out in the living room, but he drove Dad insane.”

Mackenzie sat back, his arms folded, a wide smile on his face, and I no longer questioned my attraction for him.

“The bedroom was out,” I continued, “and a windowless closet seemed cruel and unusual punishment. My father claims to be constipated since the bird-in-the-bathroom evolved, but he tries to cope.”

Mackenzie grinned. He looked relaxed and vulnerable. I am not a nice person. I took advantage of it. “Clarence?” I whispered.

“You’ll never guess,” he said lazily, “so continue.”

“Well, C—may I call you C? Or is that presumptuous? The specialist told Mother that the bird was bored. Waiting to hear the next toilet flush isn’t enough to keep a parrot perky. Pulling out feathers was a way to fill the time.”

“What’s to become of him?”

His arms were stretched out on the back pillows of the sofa, his fingers only inches from my shoulder. I could feel his body heat, or force field, while I spoke. “The doctor suggested TV. Sports are out because Daddy will not have a squawking bird share his games. So, either the rummy-tile ladies are going to know that Mama’s got a naked bird behind the shower curtain, or she has to figure out what kind of programming appeals to parrots.”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and smiled. “Goddamn,” he said, and laughed out loud. Then he sat up. “Mind if I make myself comfortable?” he asked.

Frankly, I was delighted. He put his notebook on the coffee table and took off his camel-colored jacket. Then he stretched, and I could see his ribs press against the fine blue fabric of his shirt.

He turned and looked at me. Really looked at me. His eyes, his face, his mass of silvered hair were hushed and waiting and very beautiful.

But I couldn’t stop looking at his blue shirt. Or rather at the gun that nestled beneath his arm. I felt as if he had taken off a mask and become somebody I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet. Or else, I had taken off blinders and found who he really was. “Put it away, please,” I said. “Somewhere I can’t see it.”

He nodded sadly. “I think you’re fine, Amanda Pepper,” he said softly, but there was a wistful tone in his voice that frightened me. He carefully undid the leather contraption on his chest and put it and its contents on the floor, out of sight. “But I don’t think we can make it.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because of that. Because of who I am, what I do. Because of how it’s been. What’s happened. How we met.” He kept looking at me. “My timing’s off, my sense of where to go, how to proceed. My job keeps overlappin’ onto what should be us, and I can’t seem to stop it. An’ I don’ want to mess up somethin’ that could be…real fahn.”

His drawl increased with his hesitancy.

I was moved by his confusion, his sensitivity. I didn’t have to look at the gun on the floor, and I didn’t want to consider our past, the scenes behind us. I wanted to erase the taste of death the only way that seemed possible. But I couldn’t say that, wouldn’t literally drag corpses back into our world right now. So I took both his hands in mine. They were good hands, human hands, strong hands. Without the gun, he was a man, and a fine one.

“Forget your job,” I said softly. “This is after-hours. A separate story altogether. It’s like curling up with a good book. Your character’s been established, and so has mine. A strong mutual interest has been clearly demonstrated, some interesting complications, and—”

“You’re not forgettin’ your job, English teacher.”

“Shh. Anyway, it’s relevant. We’re at the end of the introduction, Mackenzie. The end of the beginning. Now we have to get to the denouement, the unraveling of the mystery. Our mystery.”

He grinned. “You sure?” he asked, and I nodded. I could see his wide shoulders relax, could feel the muscles of his hands uncoil as I held them. “You are one fahn instructor,” he said, and I was suddenly, finally, being held, enveloped by him. “It’s just that I do believe—” he said, and he kissed me, and it was the way I had hoped the curl of his lips would feel. “I do believe,” he said again after a long while, cupping my face in his hands, “that where I come from—” and he lifted my hair and kissed the nape of my neck, my ears, my temples—“mah English teachers told me that in dramatic structure—” and he pulled me closer still and we held each other, rocking quietly—“before the denouement, there is another significant step—” and his hand behind me stroked my back, sliding slowly down the silk—“known as the climax, I do believe.”

“I do believe so myself,” I said, and then we didn’t say much for a long time. There was too much to find out.

There was Mackenzie and his gold-toned skin to explore; there was the way he turned his slow Southern tempo into a lazy, timeless voluptuousness. And with him, through him, I felt just as new, redefined and given shape in the endless moment we shared.

All I can say is that the man knows his dramatic structure.

“You’re very beautiful,” he whispered eventually. “An extraordinary woman. Very fine.”

“Your drawl is gone.”

“It’s a symptom of stress,” he said. “It is also a fahn aphrodisiac for Yankee women. Almost as effective as your leavin’ the top two buttons open on that silky, touchy thing you were wearin’.”

“Mackenzie, you are one smug, supercilious Southerner. And very fahn as well.”

“And a man of honor. I promised you dinner, didn’t I?”

* * *

“Miss Peppah?” he said when we were reassembled and ready to leave, “it has been an honor and a privilege to make your acquaintance.”

I curtsied. I came damn near to simpering.

We didn’t have any sunset to walk off into. But then, we weren’t playing for an audience.