Caught Dead in Philadelphia Read online

  “Sissie Bellinger. Remember her? Skinny blonde who was at the engagement party. It’s all her fault. It was her idea to have a benefit show for Hayden Cole, to drag in half the Main Line at one hundred dollars a seat. And how could anybody object? Sissie’s one of the biggest backers—patrons—of the Playhouse. Frustrated actress herself. She hangs out there half the time, driving everybody up the wall while she supervises her write-off. Damn her.”

  He stood up and limped toward the collection bin. I followed with my full tray, trying not to think of the wide-eyed kids in the starvation ads who would die for want of what I scraped off my plate.

  “Benefit! Certainly didn’t benefit Liza. She meets Mr. Candidate and kisses off everything she’s worked and hoped for. Good-bye, New York, acting. Hello, Hayden, the hope of the bland people.”

  “Don’t you think you’re making a bit much of this? Maybe it’s what she wanted all along.”

  “Hayden?” He slammed down his tray. “Hayden Cole? Maybe his money. Maybe his power. Maybe his status. Maybe just the ego-pumping thrill of being invited to share it. But Hayden himself? You’ve seen him—he could be her father, practically. Looks like a desiccated—Maybe I wasn’t what she wanted, okay. Maybe I don’t understand her. But I understand enough to know she never wanted any Hayden Cole!”

  We climbed the stairs together. Neither the food nor the conversation had turned lunch into a leisurely affair, and there were forty minutes left before my last class. I could get some papers marked.

  “I think I’ll have a smoke,” Gus said. “Coming along?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Again?” He looked at his watch. “I’ll try to catch Liza at the end of next period. If she shows.”

  “She’d better.” It was the only aspect of Liza that concerned me at the moment.

  * * *

  Gus once designed a coat of arms for our school. On a shield of rulers and pencils rested a dunce cap. Below it, in elegant calligraphy read the legend: Philadelphia Prep: For the Rich and the Retarded. It was not adopted as the official school emblem, despite its hard kernel of truth. Our building, an imposing center-city mansion, is far more impressive than our students’ minds. However, I am still not sure what I want to be when—or if—I grow up, and since my liberal arts degree does not include the courses in audiovisual aids and such that give you public school teaching credentials, I try not to make too much fun of Philly Prep because its slack admission policy provides me with students to teach and the means to pay my rent.

  I sat at my desk marking compositions. I fought the urge to retreat from the plodding sentences, but eventually I lost, and I put my head down, wondering why I didn’t inspire my classes the way Liza did. I liked to think it was because I was always there and Liza was an unreliable and sporadic treat. In any case, she made plays come alive and her delight was contagious.

  She was currently generating interest in Macbeth with a class of seniors. They had only two months of school left, and they had never known a scholarly urge in the first place. Their grades were long since submitted to colleges, their fates by and large determined, and the two remaining months of school were no more than glorified day care in their eyes. Even so, they listened to Liza and to William Shakespeare. Until you’ve faced a crowd of graduating seniors, you have not experienced apathy and cannot appreciate the heroic and historic feat Liza had accomplished.

  She was very involved with her work. “I’d like to rewrite this play,” she’d told me once of Macbeth. “With a more sympathetic Lady M. She wasn’t a bad old girl. No different from the rest of us, really. She wanted to get somewhere in life. She was just clumsy and overly moral, carrying on like that. She should have hung around until the crown settled onto her head. Once it was old, she wouldn’t have gotten bad press.”

  “Come on,” I’d protested. “There were a few murders on her record.”

  “You’re naive, Amanda. Once you’ve arrived, it doesn’t matter how you got there. People don’t peep behind the stacks of money. Hayden’s handsome trust was built on shaky land grants, Yankee slave ships, a lot of dead Indians, and God knows what else. But it happened long ago. So who cares now? Who cared twenty years ago when his daddy was governor? Time washes off the blood, Mandy.”

  She paced around, thinking. “For example, my engagement ring. You’d be upset if you thought I’d stolen it. But if it’s an antique—if it was stolen a few generations ago, would anybody care? See this locket? Hayden’s mother gave it to me, and you should have seen the ceremony attached to the presentation.”

  She hunched over, transforming her curvaceous body into a sexless, heavy mass. “Liza, dear,” she said in a low, nasal voice, “this was Grandmother Lucy Bolt Hayden’s, and then her son, my father, Benjamin Sedgewick Hayden, gave it to my mother, and my mother gave it to me. Now you are to have it, and someday…”

  Liza straightened up and became herself again. “Now where did Gramma Lucy get it, do you suppose? Her daddy probably dumped a shipload of slaves down South and blew part of the profits on a trinket for his kid. Does anybody care if this locket cost a life? Time has cleaned it off.”

  She’d picked up the twelfth-grade anthology with Macbeth in it. “The point is, Lady Macbeth should have stuck it out. Silly fool, washing and washing those bloody hands, when all it took was time. She was much too moral.”

  The two o’clock bell jarred me out of my reveries. Students barreled through the door, looking for Liza.

  Their disappointment was nothing compared to mine. I waited. I took roll. I simmered. Then I broke into a boil. Maybe now that Liza was moving into money and power, she could break the rules the rest of us followed.

  But that didn’t mean I couldn’t protest. “Please read the play silently for a few minutes. I’m going to see if I can find Miss Nichols.”

  I charged down the hallway, hoping to bump into Liza. But I saw only Gus, closing his classroom door.

  “The actress is AWOL,” I snapped, as if his pessimistic predictions had made it come true. I stormed past him toward the school office. I wasn’t sure what I could accomplish, but I was angry and needed to let it out on someone, somewhere.

  But not on Helga Putnam, the office witch. As I neared her, she pulled her gray cardigan tightly around her shoulders as if suddenly chilled. She didn’t like her domain invaded by teachers. Or students. Or parents.

  “Miss Pepper!” Helga never wasted time on pleasantries. “I was about to send a messenger to your room. When Miss Nichols completes her hour, send her here. She hasn’t signed in at the office, and we cannot tolerate such unprofessional behavior!” Her nose glowed at the tip in a red blotch of congealed rage.

  As furious as I was with Liza, I was not about to ally myself with the harpy behind the desk. “I’ll tell her,” I said. It wasn’t really a lie. I would tell her—whenever I could. I walked over to the telephone at the far end of the room. A grid of mailboxes covered much of the nearby wall. I’d emptied mine that morning, but it had been fed more squares of paper, more of Helga’s reminders about “professional behavior.”

  The mailbox labeled “L. Nichols” was overflowing with old notices, new notices, and a small brown package. Since I’d already implied that Liza was in the building, I surreptitiously emptied the contents of her mailbox into my pocketbook.

  My descent into a life of duplicity continued when I picked up the office phone. I could feel Putnam’s eyes bore into my back, I could sense another memo about personal-call vouchers. I pushed down the button and spoke into the dead receiver. “Operator? What is the area code for Fargo, North Dakota?” There was a gasp behind me, then the scratch of pen on paper. “Of course I’ll get the charges, Helga,” I said without turning around.

  “Thank you,” I told the dead receiver, and then I dialed several numbers before I released the buttons, waited for a dial tone, and called my house. The phone rang fourteen times before I slammed it down. She wasn’t there, then. She wasn’t anywhere.

&n
bsp; Helga snorted as I left the office.

  My class was midway through a small war or bacchanal. “Back in your seats,” I said. “We’ll read the play together.”

  The room was overheated, and the rain on the windows lulled us all. The kids droned through their lines. It wasn’t the same without the resident actress.

  Lance Zittsner, who had trouble reading an Exit sign, stammered and spluttered through his part. “Bo-bloody instructions, which being taught, return to—” He looked up at me, sweating. “To plaque? Like on teeth?”

  “To plague. ‘We do but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.’ That means—”

  But the 3:00 P.M. bell rang, and the students, passionately uninterested in my words or Shakespeare’s, stampeded toward freedom. So much for anybody’s bloody instructions.

  I stood awhile at the rain-streaked windows. The bright slickers and umbrellas of escaping teenagers punctuated the square of park across the street. I adjusted the hems of my window shades. Philly Prep put great emphasis on keeping its rooms, if not its students, in pristine order.

  When the building hushed with the unnatural quiet of an empty school, I left, carrying a wad of still unmarked papers.

  I walked behind the school and splashed through the puddles on the makeshift parking lot. At least, having been late this morning, I was the blockee, not the blocked. It didn’t make me happy enough. I thought about Gene Kelly tap-dancing through a downpour. The thought mellowed me out all the way to Good Samaritanism. Gus’s car, nosed against the wall in front of mine, had an open rear window. Rain funneled in onto his torn upholstery. I tried squeezing my hand through the opening to unlock the door. Then I tried all the other doors. Failure. I ended up with my roll book in a puddle, my head sopping, and the realization that, unlike me, Gene Kelly was given big bucks to make merry in the rain. So I drove home.

  Or near home. I live on a cute street, as streets go. It has history, cobblestones, and hitching posts. It doesn’t have parking. My lot is two blocks from home. This allows me to enjoy fully Philadelphia’s range of weather conditions. In summer I can perspire profusely. In winter I can cultivate chilblains. And on this particular spring Monday, I was able to determine how much moisture can seep through suede boots during an exhilarating jog.

  Nothing happened when I turned the key. At first I thought my locks had been changed or I was losing my mind. Then I had a mental breakthrough, and I turned the key back in the other, wrong direction.

  The door opened.

  Liza had left the house unlocked. The magnitude of her irresponsibility overwhelmed me. I kicked the door all the way open, slammed it shut behind me, and sloshed toward the small closet at the back of the first floor. As I pulled off my raincoat, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen floor. The coffee, with sugar, cream, and cat food, was still there.

  I felt enraged, and then defeated, because there was nothing to be done about people like that who left the work of the world up to people like me. I was cold and damp, and I had boring compositions to mark, and I vowed that when I saw Liza again, I’d—

  But in midvow I turned back toward the living room and swallowed whatever threat was building. Because I saw Liza. Or part of her. A foot in a small gray shoe sticking out from the side of the sofa near the fireplace.

  Odd, unconnected thoughts popped through my brain. Nobody naps in shoes. Strange position. No answer on telephone when I called. Unlocked door.

  I moved in slow motion across the room.

  Nobody naps on the hearth with a sofa nearby.

  “Please, no.” I heard myself say it, hoped Liza could hear it. “Please—”

  Nobody naps on a hearth.

  She lay crumpled and small, like a wrecked toy, her mouth half-open, her arms outstretched as if grasping for something to hold on to. Her green shirt was twisted, one jeans leg pulled up, showing a pale section of leg. Her dark eyes stared at me.

  But they weren’t her eyes. They were mannequin eyes, with no spark, no shine of life.

  “No,” I said, near tears. “Please, no!” I bent over her, hoping, insisting it was possible she was alive, almost convincing myself despite the discolored, scraped skin on her temple.

  “No!” I screamed, putting my ear to her chest. “Please?” I listened, pressed, begged, found no pulse.

  I shook her, shouting, as if I could insist her back to life. Then I stopped, remembering first aid rules. But I shook her once again, anyway, and felt bile rise in my throat as her head wobbled lifelessly. “Liza! Please!”

  I stumbled to the telephone, bracing myself against the kitchen counter, fighting off a black circle swallowing me.

  I pushed the first number of the police.

  She was barefoot when I left. She put shoes on because somebody came here. She didn’t fall. She put on shoes to greet somebody.

  Somebody had been here. Pushed her. Didn’t get help. Watched her die.

  I put the receiver on the counter softly and stood in the narrow kitchen, listening.

  My heartbeat echoed up the stairway, off the bedroom walls, reaching whom? Who still hid upstairs?

  I could see Liza’s small foot at the end of the living room, could hear nothing but the ragged edge of my own breath.

  Off the hook, the receiver buzzed angrily. I stared at it, frozen, my mouth half-open, listening to the pulsing silence coming down the stairway.

  “Help.” My voice was a painful whisper. “Help.”

  I left the phone hanging and ran out into the rain. I stood on the front step a second, inhaling the wet air until my lungs again functioned. Then I ran.

  Two

  I sat on the sofa quietly, watching the two men inspect the fireplace.

  The shorter of the two, a slender, burnt-almond man, stroked his thin mustache. “I don’t need any lab boys to tell me that’s blood on the stone.” He crouched slightly. “Head height. She was a little thing. Maybe five feet two. She would have hit right about here.” He straightened up. “You about done, man?” he asked his companion.

  The other one seemed mesmerized. “Hmm?” he said, rousing himself. “Oh. No. Be a while longer. Want to clear a few things with Miss Peppah, heah.”

  His voice was gentle, softly Southern. It was nevertheless one voice too many for me, and it scraped across my nerves like sandpaper. I’d already told them everything I knew or knew how to say.

  “I told the other officers, the ones here before you,” I began.

  “Yes,” he drawled. “Yay-ess. I know.” But he didn’t budge.

  “Then I’ll start questioning the neighbors,” the dark-skinned one said, pulling on an alpaca-lined raincoat. “Not going to be worth anything. It’ll just give them something to talk about during dinner. While I miss mine. Your street always this quiet, Miss Pepper? Looks like a damned museum. Ye Olde Colonial Philadelphia. No traffic, no people, no nothing.” He didn’t once look at me while he spoke. “Cobblestones!” He snorted as he walked to the door.

  “Hey, Ray? After you finish the street, you’ll get those addresses, right? I’ll be out in twenty minutes or so.” As he spoke, he walked over and settled himself in my suede chair, taking great pains to arrange his long legs.

  Ray opened the front door. “How come you white boys get to sit in warm houses, man, and I get to walk up and down in the rain?” And he left, slamming the door behind him.

  So. Almost everyone was finally gone. Liza was gone. The photographer was gone, the bluecoats, the man who measured everything, the man who sprinkled everything, and the two who had already questioned me—all the bodies, living and dead, who’d swarmed over and clogged up my house for hours were gone. All except this one, who was making himself very comfortable across from me.

  “Don’t you mind Raymond,” he said, running his fingers through his curly, somewhat unkempt hair. “He’s a man of reg-lar habits, and he dislikes working through his dinnertime. So do I, and, I presume, you don’t like being bothered just now. But I do hav
e some questions, so if you’d kindly explain one more time, I’d ’preciate it.”

  The slurred voice, the handsome features, the friendly expression, the relaxed and sociable pose didn’t disguise the fact that he wasn’t making a request, but a demand. Still, I didn’t know what was left to say.

  “Miss Peppah?” he prompted.

  “I don’t know what you want. I’ve said everything already. Several times. I came home and found—”

  “Exactly when was that?”

  “Around three forty-five.”

  “Where’d you go after school?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Miss Pepper.” He seemed to remember his accent only sporadically. “Philadelphia Prep is ten blocks from here. The distance could be strolled in fifteen minutes. Why’d it take you forty-five minutes to drive it?”

  “What kind of question is that? I stayed in my room awhile after school. Then it was raining. There were barriers up for potholes on Fifteenth Street. My parking lot is two blocks away. Why do I have to tell you this? What does it have to do with anything?”

  He shrugged and fixed his pale blue eyes on me as if I were a dull specimen. “Is there anyone who can verify your stayin’ after school?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Didn’t I say it clearly?”

  I tried to stay calm. I had been trying for hours, with varying degrees of success. “I didn’t see anybody,” I snapped. “Why are you treating me this way? It was horrible enough finding her. Why are you treating me as if I—”

  He loosened the edges of his mouth. I realized he wasn’t much older than I was, despite the sprinkle of gray in his brown hair. And he wasn’t really fierce looking. It was just that he was very tall, and having the entire force of the law behind him gave him an awesome stature.

  “Sorry,” he said in his soft, slow way. “I know it’s rough on you. But at the risk of stating the obvious, I’m doing my job. I’m a detective. I detect. They give us a list of questions to ask. If we don’t ask them, they take away our badges. So ease up—stop interpreting my motives and humor me.” He sighed and continued. “You say you got home at quarter to four, but we didn’t get the call until four-twenty. Why?”