As we finally bade him goodbye, Hal thanked us for helping with “his problem.”
“What are neighbors for?” was Carly’s reply.
Human lives are at least as delicate as antique lace, but are not so simple to repair.
Hal left the next day for the lab. Someone had to run the place. Eventually Sandy pleaded guilty to all charges. He’ll be staring at those four walls the rest of his life. Carly heard from Deenie when she got out of the hospital. Even with his illegal earnings, Sandy had lived well beyond his income; Deenie was selling the Berkshire, Cape, and Newton houses and planned to travel to Europe to forget. I sent her a note with Mama’s address in Cannes. They’ll get on like a house afire.
There’s a nip of autumn in the air now. Gran’s house is repaired, and I’ve been settling in to brave the winter alone here on the jester’s foot, just me and pages and pages of Perkin. Yesterday Uncle Ernando started weatherproofing the Benson house. He told me Hal has found a successor at the lab and will be arriving in a few weeks.
It looks as though I’ll have a neighbor for the long cold winter.
Kinship
by Stephen Wasylyk
Through the plate glass I could see Woody Ban-marching diagonally across the street toward my street-front office, crewcut and broad shoulders canted six degrees forward of his normal head up, shoulders back, get-the-hell-out-of-my-way erectness.
About right. Tomorrow night at eleven would make a week since Alfie Moser had been shot as he was about to enter his car after leaving the house of his mistress, and when the sheriff couldn’t immediately wrap one big fist in the collar of the miscreant who murdered one of his constituents, he sagged about a degree a day.
He pushed open the door, ignored Marvelous Mary’s bright “Good morning,” and glared at me.
“Got a minute?”
Mary’s eyebrows went up as she reached for a pad. Probably making a note for a future lawsuit.
I grinned. The two came from opposite ends of the spectrum. To Woody, a woman’s place was in the home. He’d probably never married because he’d never found one willing to stay there. As far as Mary was concerned, God had always intended women to rule the world but had been too busy straightening out the mess men had made to put His plan into effect.
Not wanting any furniture broken, I said, “Why don’t you take a coffee break, Mary?”
She sniffed at Woody as she passed, and we watched her float by the window. She moved gracefully for a stocky woman.
“How you can work with that woman is beyond me,” said Woody.
“That’s because she probably set fire to your animal pelt in a previous existence after you bopped her because dinner wasn’t ready. She’s intelligent, articulate, sensitive, tenacious, and a born saleswoman. I assume you’re here because you’re still floundering around.”
“Floundering. Good word. See that editorial this morning? About the only one Adams didn’t use ranting about why I haven’t yet arrested the killer of one of the town’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. And comparing me to the politicians who have forgotten why they were elected.”
Ah. That was why he was here. Comparing Woody to a politician could be dangerous, but instead of punching Adams in the nose, he’d come to me. There had been past occasions when the facts weren’t the facts and the truth wasn’t the truth and I’d helped him sort them out, so he wanted me to look into this one. Wouldn’t come out and ask, though. A great deal of pride filled out that tan shirt along with the muscular chest.
An opening to volunteer came a half hour later.
“Look, Woody, I’m going up on the hill this afternoon to check out a new listing. Any objections if I look around while I’m there?”
“If you think you can learn anything, go ahead.”
A returning Mary held the door for him as he left, knowing, of course, that little act of equality would help ruin his day.
She looked around. “Sure he took his club and loincloth with him?”
I grinned. “I’m having an early lunch so I can run up and have another look at the Ronstead house.”
“If you find anything we didn’t notice before, let me know real quick. I have someone coming in about it this afternoon.”
The attorney handling the estate had turned it over to me only yesterday, and while I was still debating how much we could get for it, she probably had it sold.
Marvelous. Showed I’d made no mistake in judgment the day she walked in six months ago with her new broker’s license and announced she was going to work for me. Children grown and husband busier than ever, damned if she’d sit around the house. She was short, a bit heavy, combed her hair straight, wore clothes that ignored fashion trends, had a round pleasant face, soft brown eyes, and a smile that wrapped itself around you like a warm blanket. Luckily I’d had enough sense not to ask why she’d selected me or to say no.
In the coffee shop around the corner, I was pleased to see Norma back from her romantic, sun-filled, spring cruise on the glorious Caribbean.
She smiled at me. Until she’d gone, I hadn’t realized how much I’d looked forward to seeing that smile each day.
I settled back in a corner booth, munching on both a tuna on rye and the problem of Alfie Moser, and hoping that no one spotted me and stopped to chat. This was a time for thinking, not conversation.
Alfie had been a short man on the wrong side of fifty with more girth around his waist than his chest and a very bad hairpiece he wore combed forward to show he was a “with it” kind of guy, which he reinforced by using words like supportive, stress, the pain of, I’ll be there for you, take charge of your life, and bonding. You couldn’t go to any sort of civic function without finding him at the head table, spouting social cliches and insisting his was the only way to do things.
He’d fiddled around for years trying to make his fortune until he acquired the first Japanese car franchise in the county. People laughed. Another loser. Who’d buy those little boxes when you could buy a real car? Twenty years later, he had three dealerships and was sneering at all of us, bad hairpiece and all.
He also had an ex-wife, a present one, and a mistress — a true role model for budding entrepreneurs everywhere.
The primary people the law scrutinizes are always those close to the victim. In this case, Number One was Marji Sutton, Alfie’s mistress, but several people had said they’d seen the porch light of her house come on and Marji run from the house after hearing the shot, so it appeared that Marji was out of it.
Number Two was Alfie’s ex-wife, Maggie. Now an underpaid, undertipped waitress, she didn’t blame her own appalling lack of judgment, faith in her husband, or both, for her low quality existence. With an ex-wife’s logic, she blamed Alfie, and let it be known that one of these days she intended to ship him to the Great Crusher in the Sky like one of his battered trade-ins.
Number Three was his present wife, Peggie. As specified in the Millionaire’s Handbook, she was the younger, prettier, mandatory blonde.
When Peggie learned of the mistress, she publicly declared she’d drop Alfie into oblivion before becoming a pit stop on the road to the goal stated in boldface on page 49 of the Handbook — arriving at age seventy-two with a nineteen-year-old Miss Universe contestant on your arm.
I finished the tuna and picked up my cup as Norma walked by, the quivering of her clinging dress turning the coffee into nectar.
Number Four was Hamilton Endicott, an erstwhile salesman at one of Alfie’s dealerships. He’d been romantically involved with Marji Sutter until Alfie convinced her that an older luxury model with all the options and a great deal of mileage left in it was preferable to a newer one that offered only a five-speed transmission and quick pickup.