Twelve

I said goodbye to Roger and went to answer the goddam phone.

It was Visalia, with a very timely offer for someone who wanted to quiz experts about firework-lore. She was going to the factory to address the work force and wanted moral support.

“I think it’s marvellous of you to go and I think it’s very wise of you to take someone,” I said. “But—I think I mentioned this, Vi—I’m not much of a one for fireworks. I don’t actually think I’m the best choice. What about Father Adam?”

“But Lexy, there won’t be any fireworks going off. Why, a firework factory is the last place on earth you’d ever hear fireworks or see them.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, if you’re sure … ”

“You’d be more likely to get shot in a bullet factory.”

She probably thought that would comfort me.

“In that case, I’d be delighted. Will I meet you there or can I pick you up at home and drive you?” Either way was fine by me. I could go early to the factory and schmooze the drones before she arrived or go early to The Oaks and find whatever Mike didn’t want me to find.

“Oh, Lexy,” she said. “I’d love you to come and get me. Oh! What would I do without you?”

Lean on her niece, nephew-in-law and, at a push, their cousins, I thought.

“Glad to help,” I said. “I’ll be there at ten.”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment at nine with Father Adam, as it happens. But that’s something I need to do alone.”

“Confession?” I said.

There was a long fluffy silence on the line, like tumbleweed in aural form, and a couple of crackles, like crickets.

“No,” Visalia said at last. “Father Adam doesn’t approve of my plans for Clovis’s send-off and he is punishing me by withholding the sacraments.”

“He is?” I thought of the flip-flops and whale-saving bangles and couldn’t see it somehow. “Can he do that? Can’t you report him to the Bishop or something?”

“He’s got me,” said Visalia. “We’re not supposed to confess a sin we’re planning to commit again.”

“But don’t you pretty much just confess the same stuff every week?” I asked.

“Planning to,” said Visalia. “That’s where you get the wiggle room. But Father Adam says Cousin Clovis spoke to him often about his horror of cremation and together they talked about the best kind of mausoleum. So he—Father Adam, this is—doesn’t believe that I’m carrying out Clovis’s wishes. Which is a sin. And I can’t confess it unless I cancel the funeral plans. And I can’t take Mass without confession. So I’m screwed.”

“Sin?” I asked. “Did he tell you what sin? It sounds like a con.”

“What? What sin do you think it is? Disobeying your husband, cara. An oldie but a goodie.”

For a minute I couldn’t speak. Then I couldn’t stop. “Gimme a break! I mean, donnez moi un BREAK! That sanctimonious bachelor with a pedicure actually spouted this shit to you on a pastoral visit? When he was supposed to be comforting you? I hope you sent him packing with a foot up the Bermuda shorts, Vi. JESUS!”

“Calm down,” Visalia said. “His hands are tied, if you’ll pardon the expression. Can’t fight two saints and two Popes. It’ll blow over.”

“Wow,” I said. “I mean … wow. Vi, I have my opinions about schools of thought and psychological models, but I will ditch every one of them before I’d use them against you. WOW!”

“You’re a good girl, Lexy,” Vi said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll be there at ten,” I said. I’ll be there at nine, I thought. Neighbours, beware!

Here’s the thing about America. Okay, one of the things, as well as the portions, the outlandish friendliness, the penchant for genealogy, and the renaissance fairs: It’s huge. If you fly from coast to coast looking out the window you’ll go cross-eyed and slack-jawed from the yawning impossible enormousness of it.

And yet all the houses around Casa Bombaro, each probably worth a cool few million, were jammed onto acre plots. Just room for an ostentatious drive, enough lawn to make it worth having the sprinklers rotate, a house ten times bigger than anyone needed, a garage for three times as many cars as they owned, and a swimming pool to accommodate the household plus enough guests to fill the garage for the weekend.

They called their acre plots “estates,” even though you could see the boundary fence from every window in the house. There was no home farm, no grouse moor, no timber forests, and no row of cottages for rosy-cheeked yokels to sleep in after long hard days spent in servitude.

Anyway, the upshot of a huge house on a tiny lot was that I reckoned there were four sets of neighbours who could easily be engaged in a war with Clovis Bombaro and might have got fed up with attrition and decided to go into battle once and for all: the houses on either side, the house across the back fence, and the one over the road. There were two more who shared a corner of the back fence, but they had their own neighbours pressing in close on four sides of their million-dollar piles, so I shelved them.

I was feeling confident bordering smug about knocking on their doors too, because I had stopped off at the thrift store and invested in an old but unmarked Pyrex dish, the white kind with a motif of little blue flowers and a clear glass lid; the sort of thing that might have been a wedding present in the fifties. What Californians would call, quite without irony, an antique.

I marched up the path of the house opposite Casa Boom, put a bright smile on my face, remembered the context, toned it down a notch, and rang the bell.

It was answered by a woman so identical to Brandeee that I took a step back before a second glance clued me in. She actually had darker hair, bigger teeth, ropier biceps, and tighter work-out clothes.

“Yes?” she said, casting a scathing look at me.

“Is this yours?” I asked, holding out the empty casserole. “Mrs. Bombaro just said the neighbour sent it over and asked me to return it. She didn’t say which neighbour and she’s napping.”

“Who?” said Not-Brandeee.

“Visalia Bombaro,” I said. “Across the way there. Her husband died on the Fourth?”

“Oh, yeah? Well, no. A casserole? No, not me.”

“So you weren’t aware of the incident?”

“Not until the disturbance.”

“You heard it?”

“And saw it. Two police cars, with lights flashing and engines running. I’ve sent an email.”

“I’m sure you have,” I said, and moved on to the neighbour on the east side.

“What kind of casserole?” said the not-quite-Brandeee I found there. She was in uniform—yoga pants, Lycra top, iPhone, and go-cup. It seemed a strange question and I couldn’t muster an answer at first, since nobody with running shoes that matched her Fitbit ever made shepherd’s pie, braised oxtail, or liver and onions.

“Coq au vin?” I said at last, which was basically spotted dick all over again, only with no teenaged boy to find it funny.

The woman blushed, frowned, then called over her shoulder. “Luisa? Did you bring a dish from home with a chicken braise for poor old Mrs. B?”

“No, Mrs. Mandeee,” came a voice from the innards of the house. Practically.

And so, since the poor old had seemed genuine enough, I left it there and moved on to the neighbour on the west side.

“Certainly not,” said the third woman. I’ll call her Kandeee. “That old thing? I use brushed steel and I’m vegan.”

I believed her.

“And were you at home when Mr. Bombaro died? Visalia wants to know but can’t bring herself to ask.”

“On the Fourth of July?” Kandeee said. “Of course not. I was giving service to veterans.”

I was pretty sure she didn’t mean she was a hooker, but I checked anyway. “Service?”

“At the soup kitchen.”

“Ah,” I said. “Kind of warm for soup, though, isn’t it?”

“Chilled eggplant gazpacho,” she said.

“Ah,” I said again and left quickly before I punched her.

I got back in the car to go round the block to the neighbour over the back fence, wondering just a bit if investigating was really this easy or if I was doing it wrong.

The fourth place was as big a spread as the Bombaro “estate” but built on different lines. To my eye, it looked more like a house and less like a medical centre. It was white, with symmetrical windows and a proper peaked roof on top. It had pillars on either side of its red door and a brick path lined with roses, pruned like lollipops.

When the doyenne answered the door, I twigged: this was plantation architecture and the woman standing before me with a meringue of pink-blonde hair and the strange, mottled-tuna look of a face-lift was a bona fide Southern Belle. She was about Visalia’s age too, and I felt sure she’d have tales to tell me.

“That poor dear sweet soul,” said the neighbour lady. She had told me her name was Dorabelle. “She and I have been friends for sixty years. We were living here already when Clovis and Visalia first came. When the little old house was there? They were beside themselves to be owners of property. It was the cutest thing! And here we still are, all these years later! They did so well for themselves and made a fine life. They threw some of the prettiest parties. Once poor Visalia learned how it was done.”

I was nodding with a fixed grin plastered on my face. It was the best I could do. Dorabelle was a humungous snob. I only hoped (and felt pretty sure) that she’d be a gossip as well and that seeing poor sweet little Visalia suffer the social blow of a murder—my dear!—she’d relish the chance to chew it over, even with the likes of me. I was right; she invited me in for tea.

“Were you here the day he died?” I asked. “Did you see anything?”

“Well now,” said Dorabelle. “I see nothing from spring to fall. Once the leaves are on the mimosa and the buckeye over there, why I’m just in a perfect bower! I’m in a forest glade. And sometimes it seems that sweet Visalia and poor dear Clovis … Well, they forget that I’m so close and hear so clearly. And of course, being Italian, they’re so very … unguarded. Don’t you always think so? I don’t mean to say that I am a cold-hearted woman. Why no. The women of my family are as vivacious as anyone I ever met. But we place a high value on decorum.”

I murmured, encouragingly. A small section of my brain was wondering if I could get her to say an actual fiddle-di-dee.

“Why, if I was of a mind,” Dorabelle said, coyly, “I could tell you things about Clovis and Visalia that no one but no one should know.”

I cast my mind back over the seven full seasons of True Blood I had watched in the post-Branston doldrums and everything I could dredge up from Whatshername in The Golden Girls.

“You don’t say,” I breathed for starters.

But that was plenty. Dorabelle set down her tea glass and scooted forward so that I was looking right down her powdery cleavage.

“Eighty-six years old and they still fought like newlyweds,” she said. “Slamming doors, firing good dishes like cannonballs. Why, that woman doesn’t have a single piece of her wedding china left to her name. And the language that flew through the air? My late husband could cuss up a blue storm like any Texas man. If the cards fell bad or the well went dry, he could shrivel a peach blossom. But not once in fifty-three years of wedded bliss did he raise his voice or use a foul word to me. Once—one time!—I had a little fender-bender in his Caddy and he told me I was careless. ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘I won’t be so careless as to share my bed with a man who talks to me that way.’ I spoke very quietly and walked away very slowly. Six weeks later he gave me an emerald necklace and begged me to be friends again.” She sighed and stroked her throat, remembering the necklace, or maybe the friendliness.

“I tried to teach Visalia to deal with Clovis in the same way—like my mother taught me—but even as late as this spring, when she caught him sending flowers to one of his lady friends, I heard her—all the windows wide open!—‘Filthy pig’ she called him. ‘I should turn the’—I can’t say the next word, dear, my daddy would come back and haunt me but—‘turn the hm-hm hose on you, you pork-oh shi-foso!’ I just can’t imagine what that means. Can you?”

“Italian for filthy pig, I think,” I said, which disappointed her greatly.

“And then lately,” she went on, “and this will tickle you like a goose feather, they’ve been in counseling! Can you believe it? Counseling, at eighty-six! You could have rolled me in panko and called me a fishstick when Visalia told me.”

“Fish!” I said. I was using a plain old ballpoint, not a Sharpie, but I drew an outline on my hand with it.

“Go to the Nugget,” said Dorabelle. “Theirs is freshest.”

“And did the counselling make a difference?”

“Oh, honey!” said Dorabelle. “It certainly did. Now instead of ‘I’ma-gonna kill you, you bitch’ and ‘You should be spinning on a barbecue, you pig’ it was ‘You’re revisiting past issues, you bitch’ and ‘Use eye statements, you pig.’ Whatever in the world eye statements might be.”

I didn’t think it was worth explaining.

“One night, my Friends of the Library reading group discussed not one single word of Pudd’nhead Wilson. We were agog. Lined up on the terrace with our martinis—just agog.”

“And on the last day?” I said. “Were they arguing then?”

“Oh, honey!” said Dorabelle. “That last day? I could have sold tickets and popcorn.”

“Really?” I said. “They were at it right to the end?” I was feeling kind of sick. I had only come to the neighbours looking for disgruntled combatants in hedge wars. What I was finding out was that Visalia’s story of truce and reconciliation, a second honeymoon in Sicily, a golden future in the lemon groves of home was so much …

“… cornswaggle,” Dorabelle was saying. I gathered my attention and gave it back to her. “There was no end. If they had stopped arguing, I might have worried about them. If they had stopped arguing, they might have been headed for the divorce court at last. But they were their same old selves. ‘Stop seeing her, you pig!’ and ‘A man has needs, you bitch!’ And then I heard the garage door and someone driving away and then … ”

“And then?”

“And then the next thing I knew was police and ambulances and a news helicopter and those tacky reporters knocking on my door and asking their questions. Could I see into the house from my property and would I accept a thousand dollars to let them in with their zoom lenses. My grandmother LaFytte would spin in her coffin if I ever did anything so trashy.”

“Plus you can’t see a thing when the leaves are on,” I reminded her.

“Honey, I know! I was up in my sewing nook, with my opera glasses, standing on a chair and I couldn’t even see the blue lights flashing.”

“Mizz Dorabelle?” I said. I had glanced at my watch and I only had five minutes to get back round the block for Vi. “Who do you think killed him?”

She set her tea glass down and put a hand up to her neck. “Child,” she said, “I am so glad you asked me that.”

“Was it one of the neighbours?”

“What? No. Why? No. Who? No, of course not.”

It seemed like a no on that one.

“I tried to tell the police, but they wouldn’t listen to me,” she said.

“I’m listening,” I told her.

“Well, Clovis ran a very successful business,” she said. “And running a business is not like running a day-care center. A good businessman has to make hard decisions and stick to them. A good businessman doesn’t rise to the top without making enemies on the way.” She sat back as if she had told me everything I could possibly want to know.

“Can you be any more specific?”

“I wish I could, honey,” she said, “but unfortunately if you’re looking around this once-great country of ours for someone too lazy to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, you don’t need a spyglass.”

“Umm?” I said.

“I think Clovis Bombaro was probably killed by one of his former employer’s, sacked for incompetence, laughed out of court when he tried to sue for wrongful dismissal, and determined to make Clovis pay somehow.”

“Well … ” I said.

“You see,” said Dorabelle, “the trouble with these people is that they sit around their apartments watching their flatscreen TVs and letting their children run wild and they just get angrier and angrier. They think life owes them a living and they just won’t take responsibility for their own poor decisions. And they have to resort to violence, oftentimes, to settle their differences because they don’t speak English, you see.”

I had lost my smile a while back and now I fought an eye roll. “Is there one in particular?” I asked her.

“Oh honey!” said Dorabelle. “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. They’re all the same. But, like I said, the police didn’t want to know. Politically incorrect, I suppose. So a cold-blooded murderer walks free.”

I got out of there. I couldn’t see a handy stick lying around anywhere in her immaculate gardens, so I didn’t actually scrape her words off me with it. I contented myself with a thorough snort before I got back in my car.

Then, for the sake of the investigation, I tried to be objective. I would certainly ask Visalia about the state of labour relations at the firework factory. I had thought myself that the method suggested an insider. I shouldn’t dismiss Dorabelle’s intuitions out of hand just because she was a rancid old horror who made Scarlet O’Hara look like a hippie.