Dinner at eight is much more civilized, anyway, and I was starving.
We walked toward Walnut Street, pausing in front of various eating options.
“Too crowded,” he said at the first.
“No…not in the mood for Chinese,” I said at the second.
“You sure?” he asked. “You know, all the Chinese restaurateurs’ children are off studying computer science, so in a few years you’ll have to order software, not mushi pork.”
“Too ferny,” he said at our next opportunity.
“Just right!” I finally declared when we found ourselves outside the inexpensive Italian place where Gus and I had eaten a few nights earlier. “No atmosphere. Just old Christmas cards pasted all over the walls, if that intrigues you. But great food and lots of it.”
They had cannelloni stuffed with liver. I no longer admit my liver fixation until I know someone very well and trust him. I had once dated—once—the most incredible pompous ass it has been my misfortune to know. He had a lineage that would bring half the city to its knees, and he hadn’t done poorly himself. He was a snob about his ancestors, his schools, his seats at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and worst of all, about food. And when I ordered liver instead of the currently chic entrée, he was as upset as if I’d demanded peanut butter and jelly on white bread.
It was okay with Mackenzie. He didn’t even flinch.
He studied the cards on the wall. I, meanwhile, having not smoked afterward for the first time, sublimated an acute desire for a cigarette by attacking the breadsticks in the basket. I wondered whether full lungs or full hips were less acceptable.
“Listen to this,” Mackenzie said. “‘Maybe a reindeer will find its way, And bring you joy and mirth today.’ Or, ‘This wish is sincere, it is the truest. May your New Year be the newest.’”
I wasn’t in a literary mood, so while he scanned the verses, I scanned the room. Men don’t seem to have the same driving need to examine and assess every passerby while eating. Or at least my men defer to my fierce lunge for the seat with a view. They also seem less able to eavesdrop on neighboring tables while conducting a conversation. Their restaurant experiences are poor, dim, one-dimensional events.
Anyway, Mackenzie was feeding his soul with the waste products of the Muse, so he didn’t notice when in walked one Augustus Winston III. It was easy to miss Gus, even if one was watching the door. He looked diminished, grayed out, and pulpy instead of lined. He nodded to the owner and limped toward a small table near the rear.
He seemed in need of a friend. I mentally squirmed. If you’ve had your sense of guilt as carefully nurtured as I have, there are certain no-win situations. One of them is when you have to choose between a new sex object and an old friend. I sighed. “Gus is over there,” I said.
“Invite him over,” Mackenzie said.
He was a marvel, accepting first my liver, then my friend. I was hopeful, too, that a leisurely meal and some wine would smooth away the edge of suspicion between the two men. It took a while to catch Gus’s eye, but I did, and gestured extravagantly for him to join us. He limped over, eyeing Mackenzie with suspicion before seating himself.
“I, ah, there’s no show tonight,” he said by way of introduction and explanation. “You heard about Eddie Bayer?” Obviously, Gus wasn’t a fan of the six o’clock news. “What’s going on? Liza, now Eddie. Is somebody killing off our whole troupe?”
It was a new angle. “Do you think it’s the ghost of an outraged playwright?” I picked at the crumbs of my breadstick.
Nobody even smiled. I realized that my little summit meeting was probably not a terrific idea.
“How did you hear about Eddie?” Mackenzie asked Gus.
There went the evening. It had been fun and games for a while. Oh, much more than that. But we were back on the black brick road, stomping on down to the slough of despond. I experienced my first case of postcoital depression.
When Gus finally answered Mackenzie, he sounded cautious and verbose at the same time. Very unlike himself.
“Cathy called. His wife. She needed to talk to somebody, anybody, I guess. Needed to say what had happened, over and over again. Called herself a widow woman, said she had to start handling things, taking charge of her life, but she was scared. Didn’t know how. She babbled about life insurance and day-care centers and retraining programs and didn’t make lots of sense. I tried to calm her, to slow her down, but she went on and on about the list of things she had to do by herself.”
I said a silent prayer for poor Catherine Bayer. May she get a belated handle on her life.
“And she talked about women,” Gus continued. “Eddie’s women. One who’d caused trouble, and even about a policewoman who’d come looking for him. A tall woman with…and her partner, a cop from the South, and…”
I snapped another breadstick into four segments and proceeded to eat one at a time.
“You, Mandy?” Gus said. “It wasn’t you, was it? Did you…Eddie, too?” I nodded.
“What’s with you? Why would you be there?” He stopped talking as if somebody had corked up his mouth. His lined face looked like a turtle’s pulling into its shell.
I shrugged, trying to imitate James Bond’s attitude toward danger and death. That is, of course, James Bond stuffing his mouth with breadsticks. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “I was supposed to—” But Mackenzie was shaking his head no in slow motion, boring into me with an icy blue-eyed silencer, and I stopped. Cleverly, I simply ate more, carbo loading for some unknown marathon ahead.
Surely Gus wasn’t under suspicion again, or still? The Pooh business had cleared him, hadn’t it? He wasn’t the Winnie. But then, the gold charm had been for Eddie, and he wasn’t “it,” either. The gold charm had ultimately meant nothing. I peered at Gus from behind a new wall of reserve. The lines on his face had become crevasses.
Nobody spoke. It could have gone on that way throughout eternity had not Giorgio, the waiter, found Gus in his new spot. “Ah, Mr. Winston, a night of surprises! First you are here late, and then you go and confuse me with the musical chairs.” Luckily, Giorgio was fond of solos, because he waved the air with his oversize menu and continued despite the lack of response from our trio of zombies. “No matter, no matter!” he practically sang. “What can Giorgio bring you tonight? The calamari is—” Since the language had no words excellent enough for the squid, Giorgio brought his hand to his mouth and kissed it, loudly. “And the stuffed ziti—what can I say? Maria’s grandmother’s recipe. Old country. Perfect. Our eggplant? The house sauce is—”
“Spaghetti, Giorgio,” Gus said. “Meat sauce.”
“Spaghetti? Spaghetti? What kind of choice is spaghetti with meat sauce? For that you can go to the supermarket.”
“Spaghetti, Giorgio,” Gus repeated, and the waiter departed with a histrionic sigh.
Gus leaned over the table. “Now listen, Mack—”
“Mackenzie,” C.K. said, and his voice was like a slap.
Gus’s skin took on a mauve tinge. “Mackenzie, then. You’d better—”
“Ah! You make Giorgio so surprised he forgot to ask about the wine!” The waiter had regained his sunny Mediterranean zest, and he stood on tiptoe, waiting for the thrill of Gus’s wine choice.
“Red.”
“Red? You are sick, perhaps, tonight? Red, like a crayon? I have a Bardolino; it will make you happy again. It will make your heart sing. It is for men.” Giorgio flexed his muscles like a strong man; then he hugged himself. “But tender, too. Or a Chianti Classico that—”
“Fine,” Gus said. “That’s fine.”
Giorgio backed off like a whipped dog. But luckily, at the next table, four buxom women in flowery dresses waited with anxious delight for something to spark their evening. Giorgio put in Gus’s wine order, reinflated himself, and danced over to them.
During which performance, our table maintained its funereal silence.
“You were about to say something?” Mackenzie prompted. “Something vaguely threatening?”
Gus’s shoulders drooped. “Not threatening. But dammit, Mackenzie, why involve her in this? You don’t need a date to hunt corpses. Leave her out of it.”
“I’ll assume you mean that as her friend, Winston. So as her friend—which I am as well—stop butting in. Stop giving advice. She’s okay. I’m not involving her in anything.”
I was obviously not there. I must have left and not noticed it, the way they were discussing me. “Hi!” I said brightly. “Maybe you’d be interested in hearing how I am from me?” Nobody noticed, so I retreated and watched them volley. I pretended it was Wimbledon.
“Well, you’re sure botching it if you’re not trying to involve her,” Gus snapped. “She’s around two dead bodies in one week. That’s some track record. Are you badgering her about this one, too?”
“Did it appear to you that I brought Miss Peppah here to badger her?” Mackenzie drawled. “And anyway, why would I? Do you see some connection between the deaths? Other than your brilliant theory that somebody’s stalking your ensemble.”
My cannelloni was slipped in front of me with the grace of a matador’s pass. “And you!” Giorgio said to Mackenzie with a chuckle. “Osso buco for the gentleman.” He lowered his voice to a mournful lament. “And spaghetti with meat sauce for Mr. Winston.” He filled our glasses.
“There was talk about Eddie and Liza,” Gus said, looking at his wine. “But there was always talk about both of them separately, too. So who knows?”
“Or maybe nobody would gossip specifically about Liza in front of you,” Mackenzie said. “Possible?”
Gus looked in danger of disintegrating into the spaghetti strands. “Maybe,” he acknowledged.
“But still,” I told the tablecloth. “Even so…” The men watched each other.
“And what would that talk have to do with murders?” Gus had worked his face back to something like its normal sandpaper contours. He drew lines in his congealing meat sauce with his fork.
“The food’s getting cold,” I said, eating some of mine. My cannelloni responded warmly, but nothing else did.
“Maybe the talk means nothing. Maybe everything. You know what does mean something?” Mackenzie pointed his fork at Gus. “Liza,” he said forcibly. “Liza.”
Both times he said the name, Gus recoiled, as if the fork, or something, pierced him.
“Liza is where it started,” Mackenzie continued. “Eddie’s death is connected because he was connected to Liza.”
“I still don’t know what you mean, ultimately,” Gus said stiffly.
“I don’t know about ultimates, Winston. But it means, to me, that he died because he knew who killed Liza Nichols. He knew something incriminatin’ that the killer couldn’t risk having exposed. Or, at the very least, the killer thought he knew something.”
There was somebody else in town who might be thought to know something. And I liked her very much. I didn’t like going through another round of reasons why I was prime target number three.
Gus pronounced each word distinctly as if tutoring a rather slow learner. “And do you have any idea who this person is who wanted to kill Liza? And do you have any idea why?”
“Maybe,” Mackenzie said. “But that is, after all, literally my business. And while we’re on the subject, where were you this morning before the funeral?”
Gus’s face became splotched. “Dammit, are you suggesting—”
“The food is cold,” I said. “I thought we came here for dinner.”
They looked at me as if I’d just bopped in off the street and tried to sell them my mother’s body for a few bucks.
“Mandy,” Gus said after he recognized me, “I still don’t understand your role in all this.” He turned back to C.K. “And you never answered me. Leave her out of this. It’s dangerous. For God’s sake, you know that. If she keeps hanging around the scenes of murders, if she keeps looking like an auxiliary policeman, then she’s liable to get hurt.”
Mackenzie looked more likely to devour Gus than the osso buco.
“Listen to me!” I was so loud that the four flowers at the next table stopped talking and looked over. I lowered my voice. “I’m here. I’m sick of being discussed and debated while I’m right here. You’re scaring me and ruining dinner. Shut up and eat!”
They listened to me. Giorgio, however, was not going to be pleased by the pushed-around messes left on Gus’s and my plates. Mackenzie alone managed to eat.
“I, ah, have to go,” Gus said after he’d disfigured his spaghetti. “Meeting at the Playhouse, even if there’s no show.” He gave a small, unhappy chuckle. “We’re having some casting difficulties. Losing people. I’ll excuse myself, if you don’t mind.” He pulled out his wallet and stood up.
“Gus.” I reached out and touched his hand. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh. I know you care and you’re trying to protect me. But I’ll be okay. I promise not to find any more corpses.”
“I don’t want to find yours,” he grumbled; then he limped away to the cashier.
“You didn’t have to lay into him that way,” I told Mackenzie. “He was trying to be kind.”
“You sure?” Mackenzie’s voice wasn’t precisely a lover’s caress. “You sure he wasn’t upset because somebody he likes may become so involved in this that he has to get rid of her, too?”
“That’s disgusting. That’s perverted. You’ve got tunnel vision, some hang-up about your role in life. You see everybody and everything as suspicious. Gus isn’t—”
“Cleared. Gus isn’t cleared. Drop back a few mental steps and consider. He still has no alibi for Monday, and God knows about this morning. He’s a man who knows how to hate, and no matter how warped, he had a reason to hate Liza. You know, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—except for the amazin’ fury of some scorned men. And finally, Miss Peppah, you do not have access to all the available information anyway.”
“Such as?”
“You want dessert?”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Good.” He surprised me by helping me with my chair.
It was drizzling in a pleasant, soft way. A fine, almost invisible spray coated my skin by the time we got home.
My house looked warm and inviting, a stage for fantasies we could wrap around us. I still had firewood left from the winter, and a bottle of brandy somewhere, and…
“Winston was right about one thing,” Mackenzie said. “You can’t keep on being seen with me. Some nut’s going to think you know what’s going on. Not that you do, of course.”
“Not if you keep being evasive and cryptic and asking me about dessert when you could give me hard facts. But that’s okay with me. Let’s stay invisible. We’ll hide in here.”
“That wasn’t what I—”
I kissed him lightly. “Excuse me for a minute?” Upstairs, I readied my bed and bod for the great Pepper-Mackenzie reunion I had penciled in for the remainder of the night.
“Good idea,” Mackenzie said when I was back downstairs.
“You read minds, too?”
“I’ll be a minute,” he said, heading for the staircase himself. “Wait here.”
He didn’t read minds. What he did was take the stairs two at a time.
“Hey there,” he shouted down after a few minutes.
I knew he’d catch on eventually. I walked to the stairs and was on the first tread before he called out again.
“Mind if I use this phone? I have to make a call. Business.”
I sat down on the staircase, refusing to be discouraged. I didn’t like his working hours, his compartmentalized mind, or the fact that I was so obviously shut out of this particular compartment that he was hiding in the bedroom to make a call. I moved up two steps and listened.
He sounded tired. “I was tied up around seven, Ray. Couldn’t call.”
I remembered the tie-up fondly. And remembering, I moved up two more treads.
“Tense as hell. He overexplained how he heard about it. Check whether Catherine Bayer really called him.”
I could picture him standing by my bed, foolishly ignoring it.
“I think I’ve got someone up there who’ll loosen up about the records. Tomorrow, I expect.”
That made no sense. I moved up another step.
“Everybody. All of them. Between nine and twelve this morning. We’ll go over it later.”
He sounded finished. I crept down the stairs, afraid to be caught eavesdropping. I realized that the little pile of mail I’d picked up this afternoon was still on the coffee table. It looked like an uninspired collection of bills and sale announcements. Mackenzie’s voice became loud and annoyed. I could hear him clearly from where I sat in the living room. “Yeah, well I’m workin’ the same hours, Raymond, so we’re both doin’ slave labor.”
More silence. I arranged myself seductively on the sofa, checked out my phone bill, and then realized that the last envelope had nothing on it. No address, no return address, no stamp. It had been shoved through the mail slot.
“Amnesty International would not be interested!” Mackenzie boomed into the phone upstairs.
I could not have explained the ominous sense that white envelope produced except that it was not the way an envelope should look. It had not arrived the way mail is supposed to. Obviously, my tolerance for the unexpected had dropped to zero. I cautiously ripped it open.
Mackenzie loped down the stairs. “That Raymond never quits,” he said. “As if I weren’t workin’, too. As if—”
His voice seemed very distant. I was completely engrossed in unfolding my mail in slow motion. Mackenzie came over and sat next to me just in time to see the most primitive, least-welcome message I’d ever received.
It wasn’t verbose. There were only three words, all cut from what appeared newspaper headlines and ads, then taped onto the page. Even so, it made its point. Eloquently. All it said was:
1. HER
2. HIM
3. YOU
“HER” and “HIM” were crossed out, items taken care of on a list of things to do today. I looked at the “YOU” until the letters seemed to levitate and come closer to meet me. Until Mackenzie gently removed the paper from my shaking hand.