Thirteen

Your neighbour over the back’s a bit of a one, isn’t she?” I said to Mizz Vi, minutes later. I had found her sitting in the foyer looking like she’d been sent to the headmaster’s study for passing notes. The house was silent around her, no sign of any beloved relatives beyond a golf bag hooked over the finial at the bottom of the stairs. “I got lost in these winding streets,” I said, “and she put me right. In more ways than one.”

“Dorabelle?” said Vi. “She’s lived there since before Cousin Clovis and I first arrived. Queen of the neighborhood. And then when Willard went to jail, she hung on by the skin of her teeth taking in paying guests and pretending they were relations.”

“Wait, stop, what? Who’s Willard?”

“Her husband. He did hard time for running a sweatshop.”

“Ahhhh,” I said. “Well, that explains a lot. She reckoned one of Clovis’s employees probably killed him because he expected them to lift a finger for their salary.”

“That sounds like Dora!”

“I take it you’ve got no suspicions in that quarter then?”

“Cousin Clovis ran a union shop,” said Visalia. “Spons a lid a lee off a dendle, you name it. I never told Dorabelle because I didn’t want to rub her nose in it, but those are the facts.”

“A union shop,” I said. “A lid, eh? Dendle.” I had no idea what the hell she meant by any of it, but I didn’t want to tell her. If she found out that I knew precisely fi-diddly-squit about factories, she might decide she’d be better off taking someone else along today.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“Can I visit the powder room before we set off?” I asked, and once I was ensconced in a little grotto of onyx and jade with dolphin taps and a gold-lamé bog-seat cover, I phoned Todd.

“Translation, please,” I said.

“Have you fallen down a well?” he said.

“I’m hiding in a bathroom and I haven’t got all day. Listen, what does running a union shop mean? What would you be doing if you sponsed a lid and a lee off a dendle?”

“What? A union shop is a—what the hell are you asking me? A union shop is exactly what it says, where all the workers are in a labor union. But the rest of it is garbage.”

“I’m just telling you what someone told me, Todd. Spons a lid, a lee, off a dendle. Is it like code that shop stewards would know?”

“Shop stewards?”

“The guys in charge of the union.”

“Labor organizers. Spons a lid, spons a lee, offed a dend OH MY GOD!”

I took the phone away from my ears just in time to stop my eardrum exploding and spraying my blood all over the onyx and jade. Todd was whooping and shrieking so loud the line was cracking up.

“Todd? What is it? Is it the insects? Have they got out? Are you okay?”

When he calmed down to a moderate eleven from his initial hundred and fifty, I realized he was laughing. When I listened closely to the laughter I realized he was laughing at me.

“Is it possible that this person said ‘sponsored little league and offered dental’? That would go with a labor union.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “What does it mean?”

“What do you mean, what does it mean? It means they sponsor little league and offer dental.”

I waited.

“It means they put up the money for small children to play baseball competitively and they include dentistry in their healthcare plan. Wow, Lexy. I mean, wow.”

“What? I’m not stupid. I just … listen, you’re not stupid, but you didn’t know what a shop steward was.”

“I knew it was two words and that they were ‘shop’ and ‘steward.’ Do you want me to come help? Where are you anyway?”

“I’ll manage, thank you,” I said. And even to my own ears I sounded prissy. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Wait, Lexy!” said Todd. “Before you go. Cindy Slagle came to look at the you-know-whats.”

“That was quick.”

“She’s a big fan of Roger’s. Whatever it was he called her in for that time, she got two papers and a conference in Cairo out of it.’

“And did she know what they are?’

“Were,” said Todd. “They’re dead.”

“Costa Rican insecticide strikes again?”

“No need,” he said. “They all just died. They were dead when Cindy went in. They couldn’t survive without a host.”

“What? What the hell were they?”

“Anoplura. Parasites. But here’s the really interesting thing. Cindy was absolutely stumped about how they got there. There’s no way in the world they could have gotten there. And yet there they were. She was like a kid in a candy store. Of course, I didn’t see this, but Nolly reported back. Cindy took about a million photographs and then resealed the bathroom and asked if we’d leave it so she could bring back a couple of grad students.”

“And can she?”

“Noleen said she would rather bake the dead Anoplura in a pie and eat it with booger ice-cream.”

“How did Professor Slagle take that?”

“She’s okay. She’ll get another paper anyway with what she’s got. Noleen went in and cleaned the place out. Good as new, she said.”

I grimaced. “It’ll still be a while before she can rent out the room, though.”

“Hah!” said Todd. “There’s a couple of kids on a budget honeymoon trip in there now. They asked in the office for extra bubble bath and an ice bucket too, so they’re definitely making full use of the place.”

I grimaced with a hard swallow. “God, I hope the little shits really are dead. Look, Todd, I’ve got to go. I’ll speak to you later, okay?”

“Tummy trouble?” said Mizz Vi, when I got back to the foyer. I had been gone a long time, I supposed.

“Time of the month,” I said, rubbing my belly down low and grimacing.

“Oh, I don’t miss all that,” she said. “The menopause was the best thing that ever happened to me. The last thirty years have been the best years of my life.”

I nodded, slowly, trying to make that little remark fit the overall picture of a marriage of flying plates and a sudden gruesome start to her widowhood. She was looking into one of the outsize mirrors, fussing with a chiffon scarf.

“Is this too much?” she said. “I don’t want to look as if I’m enjoying it, but I want to look respectful.”

She was wearing sleeveless lavender-grey crepe and Tahitian pearls. In other words, mother-of-the-bride, if the bride died on the way to the church and was getting buried instead of married.

“You look perfect,” I said. “And there really won’t be any fireworks?”

“None at all,” said Mizz Vi. “Ready?”

I had been expecting something like the toy factory from Toys or the chocolate factory from Charlie, but the firework factory, just off the causeway on the road to Sacramento, could have been manufacturing safety caps for medicine bottles or grip strips to join carpets together for all the pizzazz it showed on the outside. Not a single fountain, wrought iron starburst, or even exclamation mark hinted at what was going on inside. There was only a sober white sign proclaiming Bombaro (LLC) Manufacturing Please report at reception and a gate in a chain link fence leading to a car park full of modest, middle-aged sedans in front of a modest, middle-aged breezeblock building with a black tissue-paper rosette affixed to the door. Long story short, it looked a lot more like a morgue than the morgue.

“Oh!” said Mizz Vi. “That’s a nice touch, isn’t it? I’ll bet that was Lucinda. She’s been Cousin Clovis’s personal secretary for forty-five years. She had silver and then gold ribbons for the big anniversaries and a yellow ribbon up when he came back to work after his gallstones. She’ll be destroyed! Absolutely destroyed.”

She was. The woman who met us just inside the reception foyer doors was a walking wreck. Her eyes were sodden, her lips swollen, her cheeks pale, her nose red. Her voice was a crow’s croak and her walk a drunk’s totter.

“Oh, Mrs. Bombaro!” she said and dissolved into a fresh flood of tears, sinking onto one of the chairs in the little waiting area and sobbing there.

“You shouldn’t be here, Lucinda,” said Vi. “Why not take the day off?”

Lucinda blew her nose, volcanically, and then dropped the tissue into a waste basket. We heard it hit the bottom. “Where else would I be?” she said. “How could I?” She sniffed, pretty much as if the nose-blow hadn’t happened, and then shifted gears. “I’ve told the floor bosses and the office managers that you’re coming in. I’ve had all the extra chairs set out in the cafeteria and the lunch staff have prepared iced tea and muff-muff-muff-”

“Cousin Clovis tasted the morning muffins personally every day,” Mizz Vi explained.

“His favourite was pers-pers-pers-” said Lucinda.

“But they’re out of season so what did you order?”

“I ordered frozen mashed persimmons, of course,” Lucinda said. “Are you going to talk about the electronic initiative?”

“I’m only going to ask for ideas about the memorial cere— What?” said Visalia, saving me from looking crass by asking the same.

“Serpentina told us about it when she came yesterday,” Lucinda said. “Now you know I don’t like to cross the line between work and family, Mrs. Bombaro, but I didn’t think it was the time. No one here was ready to listen to new ideas yesterday. Of course, it would be very different coming from you, but even today I wondered if perhaps it might be too early.”

“Lucinda, my dear, you can’t overstep the line between work and family; you are family,” Visalia said. “What electronic initiative?”

“To replace factory jobs with machines?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

“To replace fireworks with lightbulbs,” Lucinda said. “To replace gunpowder with electricity.”

“What?” said Visalia. She sank down into the chair opposite Lucinda and looked her very steadily in the face. “You’re telling me,” she said, “that my niece was here yesterday talking about scrapping fireworks and making lightbulbs instead?”

“She touched on it,” said Lucinda. “Amongst other things.”

“Such as?”

“She told everyone not to pass idle gossip on to the police. She said we owed you our loyalty no matter how sad and angry we were and that Bombaro’s needed continuity and containment if we were to weather this scandal and transition into our new form without the loss of any jobs.”

I worked my jaw, trying to get back the power of speech, and I saw Vi doing the same. She looked like a carp who’d jumped out of its tank. Fish! I thought, fleetingly, but before I could find a pen to add a tiny ink fish friend for my regular-sized ink fish, Vi recovered.

“Serpentina said loyalty was key, because if I got nailed for Boom’s murder everyone would lose their jobs while she did what she’s dead set on doing?”

“’At’s about the size of it, Miss V,” said a new voice. I looked up and saw a factory foreman. He might as well have being wearing a sign. He was a squat little barrel of a man, with the brawny forearms of someone who mended large machines mid-shift to keep the production line rolling, the thick misshapen fingers of someone who didn’t always go about it the orthodox way, and the missing thumb of someone who, at least once, hadn’t switched off the machine before piling in. He had a pencil behind his ear and a red spotted handkerchief sticking out of his trouser pocket and when he sat down with a grunt on the fourth leatherette chair, he gave out a puff of perfume that was a cocktail of WD40, fried onions, and the sweat of honest toil.

“Now, I didn’t stay married all these years by listening to womenfolk when they start in on all that pansy-ass nonsense,” said the foreman. He spoke companionably, as if we might welcome his words. “But she got my attention, let me tell you.”

“And how did it go down with the sparklers?” said Visalia. She turned to me. “We call the guys and gals who work the production line our sparklers. It started out it was just the softball team—the Scrapping Sparklers—but we were so small in the early days most everyone in the factory was on the team, or cheerleading, or doing snack duty … and it stuck. Or spread. It spread and then it stuck.” It sounded gross. “Gather them, Lucinda,” said Vi. “I’ll be there in a few.”

Lucinda went back into her office and after another monster nose-blow she announced over the kind of tannoy I hadn’t seen since Grease that Mrs. Bombaro had arrived to say a few words and could everyone please gather in the cafeteria where Lana and Bertha (I think) were serving refreshments.

“I don’t know what she was thinking!” said Vi, once the salt of the earth with no time for womenfolk and their nonsense had lumbered off cafeteria-wards. “How could she do that? Why would she?”

“I can think of one reason,” I said. “It’s a brilliant double-bluff.”

Mizz Visalia gave me a quizzical look over the top of her powder compact—she was dusting her nose with the sort of pink powder you have to send away for these days.

“If Serpentina and the Dolshikov contingent killed Clovis,” I said, “the dumbest next move would be for them to reveal they had a plan for after he was gone.”

“You think his own niece killed him?”

“I think at least that she married his rival and she didn’t want him to know.”

“I always talked him out of sending someone down to Dallas to see what they were up to,” she said. “I thought it would kill him. Now I think I helped kill him anyway. If he had known about Sparky and Jan, he would have been forewarned.”

“Send someone down to … You mean like a spy?”

“We don’t call them spies.”

“But they’re real?”

“We don’t talk about it.”

“Visalia, for God’s sake. You do want this murder solved, don’t you? If the firework business really has honest-to-God spies, the police should know.”

“This she agrees they should know!” said Miss Vi to the ceiling. “They should know everything, Lexy. They should know about the Poggios, certainly.”

I tried to smile instead of sighing, but the sigh came out anyway and whistled down the sides of my teeth like a Welsh curse.

“I’ll tell them,” I said. “I promise. There’s something else I want to mention to Mike anyway. Nothing to do with this case, just something that came up in the place where I’m staying.”

“Oh?” said Vi.

“And nothing for you to worry about either,” I told her. “You’ve got enough on your plate. Are you sure you’re up to this speech?”

Mizz Vi gave me a look of steely dignity, her eyes a lot more Bette Davis than Garfield now. “My family needs me, Lexy,” she said. “It’s the Bombaro way.”