Till the End of Tom Read online

  My extremities chilled in anticipation.

  “I woke up with this vision, pure and simple, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it.” It wasn’t a good sign that she was rushing forward, her bayou words slushing one into the other. “So I thought—well, nobody’s said otherwise so far, you know, so wouldn’t it be absolutely the loveliest thing if Amanda and C.K.—” At this point, she was proving how much she cared about us by demonstrably knowing our specific, non-Sweetie names—“had a Wiccan wedding. And best of all, love—I could officiate! Wouldn’t that be fun!”

  It would not be fun. Or it might be fun. I didn’t care. It was another suddenly-urgent-though-never-once-thought-of-before item in a basket already burdened with too many of them.

  She rambled on. “. . . such an important day—after all, you only get married—”

  Holy Wicca! What was I going to do?

  The best that could be said was that the trio had now reported in. The fourth message couldn’t be from them. They seemed to have a once-a-day pact, as if they were vitamins I dearly needed, but they were afraid of my overdosing.

  The truth was, there were now four well-meaning pests. My friend Sasha claimed to have returned from England because of the wedding, and because she felt beholden to make me a shower. And even though the shower was not the main event, it had seemed to require almost as much planning, which translated into almost as many questions.

  Even now that the shower was scheduled for next week, and notwithstanding our long friendship, the questions didn’t seem over. As soon as I heard her voice, I tensed further, dreading the inevitable repeat of the already-asked and unanswered questions, about whether anybody attending had unusual eating habits, or allergies, or whether we should sing—sing!—or play games to break the ice. Also, as a tagline—of course—the concept that all this insanity was justified because I’d only get married once, a motto that became ridiculous when Sasha said it.

  She’d been married and divorced twice in her twenties and for all I knew, she’d done it again while she was living in England and had simply forgotten to mention it. It was possibly genetic—her parents had, between them, half a dozen or more nuptials. But somehow, Sasha persisted in believing in romance, in the blazing, blinding appearance of Mr. Right, and in an ultimate permanency and bliss even if it had so far eluded her.

  I grit my teeth, willing myself into patience, and concentrated so hard on not getting angry that it took me awhile to register that she was actually talking about something other than my nuptials.

  “—thinking of you even when I’ve found a new, handsome prospect,” she was saying when I tuned in. Sasha’s optimism should be bottled. She is determined to have a good time in this life, and she always succeeds, at least for a while, and when her good time inevitably ends, her heart might need short-term EMT help—or chocolate—but she’s a quick healer, and she’s back in the ring for the next round. A good man might be hard to find, but Sasha wasn’t looking for good—except as in good times, so she found what she called “love” everywhere.

  I waited to hear about this new man, and how This Time It Was for Real.

  “—he’s in the process of separating—”

  Not again. Perhaps I’m a pedant and overly concerned with the meaning of words, but I have tried to explain that a person is either separated, or not, and that a person who is still living with someone to whom they are married is most assuredly not separated. Siamese twins during surgery were in the process of separating. Sasha’s “in process” guys were still married. But you can’t interrupt a phone message.

  “—and something was going on—weird phone calls. He said it like a joke, but he seemed bothered all the same. I mean, why tell me otherwise? So of course, I told him about you guys. That’s okay, isn’t it? I mean talking about you? I mean you’re private eyes, but not so private I can’t recommend you, right? It isn’t a big job, but a job all the same. Help pay for the honeymoon, maybe. The man has bucks. What’s my referral fee? Just joking. But if Tom Severin gets in touch, you’ll know I sent him.”

  For once, one of her men had been as good as his word.

  His last word.

  * * *

  Four

  * * *

  * * *

  I sat down heavily on the kitchen chair near the phone and replayed Sasha’s entire message to make sure I’d heard it correctly. I had, and the net result was that now even less made sense. First, without a shred of false modesty, I’d have to ask—why me? Sasha had undoubtedly failed to mention my rank amateur PI status but still, she had to know that my work in the office was basically clerical. There were lots of fine, experienced investigators available versus me, an underpaid teacher with a second job, trying to make ends meet.

  So once again, from the top—why me?

  If Severin’s note had read C. K. Mackenzie, then okay. Anybody with half a brain would want Mackenzie on the case. But the note hadn’t said that, and it had specifically named Philly Prep, not Ozzie Bright’s office.

  Things that don’t make sense give me hives. I enjoy the ridiculous, the far-fetched, and the positively insane, but when something is tilted and out of whack, pretending to be straightforward, it drives me to the brink. Almost making sense doesn’t count. It has to go all the way. I want to tidy it, label it, and shelve it, and I worry it over until I find where it belongs.

  And then, somewhat belatedly, I thought about my friend and the fact that she’d been dating Tom Severin. I didn’t know if she knew what had happened to him, and I didn’t know how news of his death would affect her. Sasha was great with blowups, breakups, divorces, and amicable partings, but death was another matter altogether.

  I considered the time and the stack of unmarked essays, checked the pasta supply and then the refrigerator for anything to put upon it, found enough, and lifted the phone to invite Sasha for dinner.

  MACKENZIE RETURNED HOME before Sasha, and he opened the door when she rang. He bowed low, ushering her in. She carried an enormous bouquet of pastel ribbons and bows. “You look positively bridal,” he told her. “Is there something we should know?”

  She did look bridal, as long as we were talking about an alternate universe where wedding day attire included capes lined in fake leopard-skin and covered in brilliantly patterned patchwork worn over fire-engine red combat boots, a skirt that looked more like a long tutu with layers of chiffon in purple hues ranging from lavender to amethyst, and a black, loosely knit long-sleeved top that left one shoulder bare. She looked great. I wondered what my mother would say if I wore the outfit, including the bouquet, for my wedding. It would save us so many phone calls and questions and also take care of the “something borrowed” part.

  My future mother-in-law’s taste in clothes and color sense was perilously similar to Sasha’s, and I wondered if having both of them in the same room at the wedding would blind people.

  At five-eight, I’m not at all short, and I’m happy with my auburn hair and green eyes, but all the same, when I’m around Sasha, I feel undersized and under-colored. Sasha is vivid: six feet tall, with big and curly black hair, extravagant gestures, and outrageous clothing. Her credo has always been, “Since I’ve got it, and lots of it, I will indeed flaunt it.” It’s a fine philosophy.

  Mackenzie murmured something Southern and annoying about “girl talk,” and excused himself to study while the sauce simmered.

  “Um, pasta,” Sasha said. “Except I shouldn’t. Carbs. I want to be svelte at your wedding.”

  “Is there anyone in the world not on a diet?” I asked. “And since the answer is no, how come we all keep on having to be on a diet?”

  “How come we’re not all mentally serene and jolly and living happily ever after in romantic bliss?” she asked. “There sure are enough books about how to get that way. It’s because we don’t listen, and because I’ll have the pasta, thank you.” She thrust her ribbon bouquet at me. “What color do you want as your scheme?”

  Before this wedding
business, when I thought “scheme,” I thought plot, preferably nefarious. I still did, though I didn’t bother to say that. “Why does a shower need a color scheme?”

  “I want to do this right.”

  “Are we going to have to dress in the color I choose?” I tried to keep the horror out of my voice, to remember what a nice thing she was doing, having the shower at her condo.

  She shook her head. “Of course not, but I want to give favors—souvenirs. Little picture frames into which they’ll put a group photo I create digitally even as we shower away. I’ll print them out while you’re still tearing wrapping paper and making the bouquet of bows and—”

  “Sweet.” She was too involved in my life and spending too much of her exceedingly small cash reserves on this event. “But . . . would you think I’m awful if I asked that we avoid wedding talk this evening, including shower talk? I find it daunting.”

  “Typical.” She settled on the sofa, chiffon petals floating into a purple haze around her. “It’s the jitters. The cold feet.”

  “The boredom. The utter nonsense. The phone calls. The fact that they’ll be here to make me insane in person next week. It’s the overblown significance of the show of it—the public part, the—”

  “Okay. I concede, but if we avoid wedding chatter, what’s left to talk about except me?”

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk about.”

  “Me?”

  “The man you gave my number to. Tomas Severin.”

  Her dark eyebrows pulled toward her nose. “I thought you guys were always looking for business.”

  I sat down next to her. “I didn’t want to say this over the phone, and there isn’t any easy way to put it, except to say I hope you didn’t get too attached to him.” It might sound a ridiculous concern, except that Sasha Berg was capable—repeatedly capable—of considering herself in a committed relationship before she was sure of the man’s name.

  “I know he’s still married, if that’s the red flag you’re about to wave. But he’s separating and getting a divorce, worrywart. You’re going to be just like your mother someday.”

  I put my hand on her arm. “Sash, I really hate having to tell you this, but he came to the school today, presumably to see me, and fell down the staircase, and . . . he didn’t survive the fall.”

  She opened her mouth, said nothing, closed it, tightened it as if to again say something, let it go slack. Her right hand picked at a lilac layer of chiffon. “Dead?” she said, intently checking my expression. “Really?”

  I think that’s a universal response, that irrational hope the news was a bad joke, or that you misheard. I nodded.

  “Dead. That’s . . . that’s . . .”

  I had seldom seen her at a loss for words and even less frequently seen her look frightened. I put my hand on hers. “I had no idea he was somehow connected to you, or to me,” I said. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  The timer rang, and I jumped to turn down the burner. I gave Sasha a moment or two, and then I summoned the resident student. I not only wanted him to eat a meal that wasn’t burned, but I also wanted him to hear and react to whatever Sasha could tell us.

  The dead man had been, or had wanted to be, our client. There seemed a debt of some sort, of attention, if nothing else.

  The putanesca sauce was not ruined. In fact, it wasn’t half bad. Maybe the ladies of the night for whom it is named, hungry and tired after work, had built improvisation and inattention into the recipe. We sat around the table and made sociable, relatively meaningless chat, during which Sasha was silent. When she came out of her trance, even though we were talking about a new movie that had gotten good reviews, she said, “I thought it was a joke.”

  Mackenzie and I looked at each other, then at her.

  “A bad one,” she said. “A stupid one. I thought he’d hire you guys and you’d make money—he apparently had loads—finding out it was nothing.”

  We gave up on waiting and hoping for coherence. “What was nothing, what was a joke?” We almost said it in unison.

  “The phone calls Tom was getting. I’ve been trying hard to remember exactly what he told me, but you know, he was cute, it was the third time we’d been together and we were reaching that point where maybe something for real was starting. The thing was—lots of what I was listening to had nothing to do with what he was saying out loud. You know what I mean.”

  Of course. What passes for conversation at the beginning stages is irrelevant. It’s code. It’s body language that matters, the speculation and the interest level that registers. “But still—what do you think he said?” I prompted.

  “I think I was talking about why I came back from England, so I mentioned you and the wedding and the shower. And I probably mentioned how hard you both worked, how busy you were with school, and your day job, Manda, and I’m pretty sure that’s how it came about that he knew you were private investigators. Forgive me, but I was talking mostly to fill airspace.

  “And he said maybe he should hire you because he’d been getting prank phone calls. Only he didn’t look as if he meant the word ‘prank.’ Not giddy kids at a slumber party picking out numbers at random. Actually, I’m not sure if he said prank or crank. I asked him what he meant and he shrugged and said he felt stupid getting upset about it. Didn’t want to talk about it. But I used my Mata Hari ways and finally, he told me—I hope I’m getting this right—that the first call just said something like, ‘I know about you, Tom,’ and a hang up.” She looked at the two of us, as if we could decipher the hidden meaning in a call like that.

  I shrugged. Mackenzie said, “Not much to go on there. Not much to worry about, either. I get calls like that when somebody’s cell phone hits a tunnel, or malfunctions. Maybe they meant to say ‘Glad to know’ something or other that was cut off.” Then he shook his head, too. We were presenting a unified front, all right. A mystified unified front.

  “That’s what I thought, but there was a second call that said, ‘Tom Severin, I’m going to tell everything I know about you. I hate you.’ Then nothing, again. And a third that I think had just happened, and it went something like the same—his name and that he should be dead. Not those words, maybe, but like that.” Once again, Sasha looked at each of us in turn.

  Mackenzie said what I expected him to say, “It sounds like a prank—unless he knew who was doing it, and that someone was dangerous. But I don’t think real threats make calls like that. That’s kid stuff, timid person stuff.”

  “Maybe he did know, or thought he knew, because he must have been worried, given that he appeared at the school to hire you.”

  “Male or female?” I asked. “The voice.”

  “I asked, and he wasn’t sure. He said it seemed almost familiar, but it was muffled, as if the caller was purposely trying to disguise it.”

  “Why the school?” I was still bothered by how that didn’t fit. “Why would he come to school?”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha said. “I told him you had an office.”

  “I wasn’t there for long today,” Mackenzie said. “I was back and forth to school.”

  She looked back at me. “That could be it, couldn’t?”

  “Our business phone is his cell phone. No message on it?” I asked, and Mackenzie shook his head. The choice of making contact with him via my room at Philly Prep still didn’t make sense. “The note said my name. Very specifically. And the school. Call—or actually calls—Amanda Pepper. Philly Prep.”

  “We’re never going to know, and probably none of this matters, anyway,” Sasha said. “Except to make me feel bad for sending him to you. But if he died accidentally, then it doesn’t matter who was phoning him.” She sighed. “I finally meet an interesting guy. Just my luck.”

  “More his luck,” C.K. said. “Of the really bad variety.”

  She smiled wryly. “He was good-looking. Fit, for a guy in his early fifties. Interesting to talk to. Charming. And his tailoring—I mean he never had to say he had money. His t
ailor said it for him. Eloquently.” She poked her fork into pasta she’d barely tasted, but she forgot the part about lifting the fork’s contents to her mouth.

  I’ve known Sasha since junior high, and I half expected her to say, “easy come, easy go,” and move on to lighter topics. That’s her style, and if she grieves, she does it away from public scrutiny, so making light of losing a guy with great tailoring is very much her attitude. However, her relative listlessness and lack of appetite put the lie to her calm.

  “Do you think he told his wife about these calls?” Mackenzie asked.

  His wife didn’t seem a topic Sasha was eager to approach. She frowned and finally said, “For all I know his soon-to-be ex-wife made the calls.” Once again, she poked at her pasta.

  I nobly held my tongue. There had been too many semi-married men in Sasha’s life.

  “She wasn’t at the party where I met him,” she said, slightly defensively. “Whatever they were, it wasn’t together.”

  “At least not at the party.” Mackenzie said it. I didn’t. I thought it, and was glad my better half had expressed it and left me the good guy, the loyal pal.

  “She sounded like a bitch, anyway. I mean I didn’t break them up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nina—that’s her name—phoned me once, after the second time I’d seen him. Ranted at me, really. Like a fishwife, however a fishwife sounds. A drunk fishwife. I hung up on her.” She was silent, seemingly remembering, and then she struck the side of her head. “Wait—I just remembered what else he said. He was acting like it was all a joke, but you could tell he wasn’t taking it lightly. He said, ‘You know that old expression, with friends like these who needs enemies?’ I asked if he meant he knew who was making the calls. I mean until then, from what he’d said, I assumed he didn’t have a clue as to who was calling. Wouldn’t you?”