Mummers' Curse Page 7

  “So after a while you gave up, went back, and found Jimmy dead?”

  He nodded mutely, sorrowfully.

  “Bottom line is, you have no alibi.”

  “I’m innocent, I swear on my son’s head. But when the cops kept asking me where I was, I panicked. All I could think of was you were there, I was there, why couldn’t I have been looking for you? Why won’t you cover for me?”

  “Because it isn’t true.”

  “It could have been true.”

  “Besides, my—” I faltered, as always searching for the missing term for the Mackenzie roommate. Society’s word makers don’t create nice labels for things they aren’t sure they want to have, like romantic partners living together while legally single. “The man I live with was with me,” I said. “And he’s a cop. On this case.”

  Vincent looked as if I’d slapped him, as if I’d taken away his only chance at avoiding the guillotine. And I suddenly wondered if perhaps he had shot his old buddy.

  Who had ever said or known when it had happened? Why was Vincent so eager to establish that he was away when nobody yet knew when that should have been? Maybe he was in the parade the whole time, next to Jimmy Pat, close enough to brush by on a twirl and plant a bullet. Maybe it did matter enough who became Captain of the club, whose father didn’t die young, who wound up with Dolores Grassi. Maybe the wearing of the frame suit was the final straw.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly. Even if I don’t understand why you’re in this mess, I’m sorry you are. But my hands are tied. Aside from ethics, there’s no practical point to my lying. It won’t work, not for a minute.”

  “Oh, God,” he said, “what am I going to do?”

  “How about trying the truth?” I asked softly. “It’s so much easier.”

  “I told you. I’m not going to shame her, particularly now that he’s dead, it would be…” He might have explained more, but just then, after an overly loud warning knock—what did she think/fear was going on down here? And why warn us so loudly that she was about to witness whatever it was?—Barbs began her descent carrying a tray laden with steaming bowls and baked goods.

  That was the end of Mission: Devaney. It hadn’t been a particularly rewarding time. I still didn’t know whether I believed my fellow teacher and friend. I only established that he had a temper sudden and fierce enough to make me wonder, and what seemed a long-lasting yen for Dolores Grassi.

  Ah, yes. I also established that I wasn’t at all fond of Pepper Pot soup.

  Five

  IT WAS NOW LATE MORNING. BARBS’S SOUP AND FRUITCAKE lay heavy, greasy, and overly present on the floor of my stomach, and even so, provided scant insulation against the cold. I had no idea what I should do next, so I called home for further instructions from My Leader, who wasn’t back yet.

  Which is when I remembered that I didn’t have or want a leader. But neither did I have a sense of direction, and I would have liked that.

  I reconnoitered and figured out that I was pretty much nowhere. And so was Vincent, far as I could see.

  I didn’t understand. Shouldn’t a decently working marriage be able to withstand the innocuous truth? So maybe he carried a torch for an old girlfriend. Not optimal, but was it such a world-shaking big deal? Did it really matter all that much as long as he held the torch and not the girl?

  Or was Barbs onto something, and was Vincent lying? What was it really with the old girlfriend, his good, now dead, guy-friend’s fiancée? Did he mean he wouldn’t shame Dolores with the truth, particularly now that her fiancé; was dead, because he wanted to stay in her favor? Or because the truth would reveal him as a man having an assignation with his best friend’s fiancée, and make him seem even more suspicious?

  Dolores seemed the key to everything. If Vincent were telling the truth, then where had she been? Why was she “in distress,” as he’d put it? Why had she summoned him if admitting it publicly would “shame” her?

  Still, I was certainly not going to barge into her home and demand answers while she was in mourning.

  The night we’d all gone with Vincent to Melrose Diner for coffee, I had remarked on her luxurious black-brown hair, more out of awe than admiration, although I didn’t say so. I was rendered momentarily silent by how high and wide it flung itself, like a self-contained organism, an other that accompanied her, not something that grew out of her head. She was a small, delicately made, and fragile-looking woman—until you factored in the hair, which added a good half a foot to her height.

  She had a natural flair, a gift, she said with innocent pride. And she could make my tresses just as bouffant as hers. Dolores, it turned out, was a hair stylist at a place called Salon d’André. The name had stuck because it seemed to combine a lot of pretension with no imagination. I envisioned André in a pencil-thin moustache and a beret.

  I assumed it wouldn’t be difficult to find his salon.

  It wasn’t, particularly after I finally looked it up in a phone book and got on a bus. That came after a half hour of cold and aimless wandering.

  It wasn’t until I reached the store that I remembered it was Sunday.

  But the shop was, miraculously, open, with a small handlettered sign taped to the window. “For the convenience of our loyal customers, we will be open Sunday, January 2nd until lunchtime.” Although I felt as if the day was already 50 hours old, it was not yet lunchtime at André’s.

  “Hi, there. Help you?” A woman in a bubblegum pink smock and Jean Harlow hair flashed a smile as she worked the chair nearest the door. Then she turned back to her client, scissors in one hand. “Your ends are a mess,” she told the owner of the hair. “You’re not conditioning like I said, are you?” Her client mumbled apologies and lowered her eyes.

  There were four other work stations, three other operators clipping, blow-drying, and hair-setting, respectively. There did not appear to be a receptionist, so I walked over to the pink lady who’d hailed me. “It’s last minute and all,” I said, “but being as it’s after New Year’s, all the parties over—” as if I’d just completed an exhausting round of silver-spangled galas. Aside from the Mummers, I’d had a spangle-free vacation.

  “I thought, maybe, I could be worked in.” Winding up with a hair high-rise seemed a fair admission price. I was counting on clichés being true, on the neighborhood salon being the epicenter of gossip.

  “Dunno,” the woman said. “I doubt it, today. This is only, like, emergencies. Being as we were closed and we’ll be closed tomorrow, Monday, too. Still, let me take a look.” She flashed another smile. She had a deep and appealing dimple, and I suspected it caused her to smile whatever her mood. “Be one sec,” she told her client, who looked unhappy.

  “You have gorgeous hair,” the pink lady said to me. “Great color. That auburn looks almost natural.”

  “It is natural.”

  “Could use styling, though, a little oomph.” She strode to a small desk and checked the appointment book. “I’m Andrée,” she said as she flipped pages. “Two e’s, accent on the first one. Andrée Jansheski. Left the second e off the sign. It was easier.”

  It appeared that I, not Andrée, was the one with too little imagination. How silly to have assumed that the cross-naming phenomenon was limited to my sister’s friends on the Main Line. Was it a fad I’d missed? An underreported aspect of the women’s movement that I could pretend to write another article about?

  “You’re in luck. I have a noon with Marty. Right now.” She twinked another Andrée smile. It was a most impressive dimple. “Depending on what you want, how long it would take.”

  “Darn, I wanted Dolores,” I said. “I met her awhile back and told her I’d be in for an…um…a styling.”

  Andrée turned dark-circled eyes toward me. “I’m real sorry, hon, but Dolores isn’t available.”

  “Should I make the appointment for later in the week?”

  She shook her head. Her crimped bob didn’t move at all, as if it were a molded part of her head. “S
he won’t be in for an indefinite spell. Today, we’re only open a few hours anyway. But Marty’s good, too. You’ll like her.”

  The woman at the farthest end of the shop stopped clicking her scissors and instead waved them at me. I waved back and smiled.

  “All our operators are expert beauticians,” Andrée said. “Ask anybody in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m sure, but all the same, I had my heart set on…when will Dolores be back?”

  Andrée’s bottom lip raised until her face was pure rueful resignation. “Who can tell, hon? Wish I had a crystal ball, but till I find one, I don’t know any more than you do. When things like this happen…” She shook her head again. The white-gold waves remained in place like an ad for fixatives. “Out of the blue…”

  “Is she ill?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Her brown eyes grew wider with a gleeful willingness to share bad news. I had hit pay dirt

  “Hear what?” I tried to look confused and a bit alarmed.

  “Ohmigod, and you her friend and all.”

  “Actually, I’ve only met her once. We went out for coffee.”

  “What, that isn’t friendly? You saying you don’t like her?”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “Of course not! Who wouldn’t like Dolores?”

  “Andrée?” The woman on the chair swiveled around. “Phyllis will throw a fit if I’m not done in time.”

  Andrée nodded. “In a sec, Stel. It’s real bad,” she said to me, her voice lowered to a stage whisper. “Hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially about somebody you know.”

  Her client was a buxom woman whose flat features looked naked and overblown under her wet hair. “Excuse me?” she said, loudly. “Andrée?” She tapped her watch with a polished fingernail and looked meaningfully at the hairdresser.

  “Yes, right. Sorry, Stel.” Andrée turned to me. “Stand next to me, hon, while I finish her up. Toss your things over there. That’s Dolores’s chair. Too hot for coats in here.”

  I put my things on the bright blue chair. A photograph was tucked into the mirror above the work station. I recognized Jimmy Pat’s puckish features and Dolores’s enormous hair.

  I went and stood near Andrée. The three other operators looked me up and down during this process. I got the feeling my hair, which more or less does what it wants to on its way to my shoulders, wasn’t passing muster.

  One of the other operators, a hennaed redhead in her early twenties, was setting an elderly woman’s hair in pin curls. I had no idea those tiny implements still existed, let alone were still used for styling. And Marty, the middle-aged, no-nonsense sort, was finger-fluffing and arranging the still-wet frosted hair of her client. The third beautician looked like she’d been airlifted from a war zone to the salon for safekeeping. She was agonizingly thin, with enormous eyes and pokey elbow bones and a hairstyle that possibly aimed for punk, but emerged as waif. Her client had a manicurist working on her at the same time.

  “Hear about the guy in the parade got killed?” Andrée asked as she separated out a lock of Stel’s hair. “Guy in a Fancy Club?”

  “I saw it,” I said.

  “Who didn’t? The TV showed it enough, didn’t they? Hope the bad publicity doesn’t ruin future parades.” Andrée watched me in the mirror, much more attentive to my potential reactions than to her snipping. Stel was about to have a bad hair day.

  “Couldn’t do away with the Mummers if they wanted to,” Stel said, caught up in the conversation, “and who does? It’s like…” She couldn’t think of anything. “It’s like a tradition.”

  “Exactly.” Then Andrée looked at me in the mirror, meaningfully. “That guy who died was Dolores’s fiancé.” She paused for effect.

  I opened my eyes as much as they could go. That seemed to be what Andrée’d wanted, and she nodded, vigorously.

  “Supposed to marry him on the fifteenth of this very month,” she said, “and now he’s dead. Like that. If you could have been here for her planning and preparation. The lace for the train, her mother’s veil, the bridesmaids’ dresses—oh, and then one of them, Stacy, found out she was going to have a baby, she’d be in her sixth month by the wedding, and all the fuss about how to have her wear the same dress and not show because Dolores wanted every single second to be picture-perfect. ‘The day of my life,’ she called it.”

  “I heard rumors,” Stel said.

  Andrée ignored her. “Dolores is like that. Whole family is. Attention to details. Everything has to be just so. If the Grassis do it, you know it’s done the way it should be. Always been that way. Proud people. And you have to believe that in a family of four sons, the youngest one, the only girl, their baby daughter is going to be sent off in style. The flowers—if you could have heard the talk about what kind of bouquet for her, for the bridesmaids—”

  “I heard there was trouble. Big trouble.” Stel was feeling shut out and petulant.

  “Trouble? I’ll say there’s trouble. He’s dead!” Andrée said.

  “I mean before,” Stel insisted.

  I was a front line correspondent in the war of the gossips. Who’d be the victor who’d get to charge the hill first with news of The Big Trouble?

  “A makeup specialist was going to come in that morning,” Andrée continued. Stel, I suspected, sagely remembered the scissors in Andrée’s hand and kept quiet. “I was flattered, she wanted me to do her hair. But even that, we talked about the styling for weeks. It was going to be gorgeous, piled up, with curls on the side, just so, and now, look, everything gone because of some lunatic.”

  “Andrée—” Stel whined. “You know. About Jimmy?”

  Andrée was not about to turn over the flag, give the field to Stel. She upped the volume and continued her advance. “Who’da thought of such a thing—killing a Mummer goin’ up the street? I tell you, people have gone crazy. And Dolores such a sweet one, too. So sad. A widow before she’s a bride.”

  “But I heard—you must have heard, too…”

  That was clever. Stel outflanked her opposition with her prior knowledge. We both know this, she was saying in essence, I admit it’s not fresh news, so why don’t you let me say it?

  “You never heard anything that said Dolores wasn’t a sweetie, did you?” Andrée’s smile, despite the deep crease of dimple, was slightly frosted.

  Brilliant defensive ruse. She had refused to answer the obvious, and had instead deflected the question by protesting a completely imaginary argument. Andrée didn’t subscribe to the idea that the customer was always right.

  Stel shriveled, became less inflated and buxom. “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t I know the Grassi family? We go way back, and I would never say a word against them. Nobody would, but with me, it’s even more. My mother’s second cousin is married to Dolores’s father’s sister’s brother-in-law. We’re related.” She took a deep breath. I could almost see her weigh her options. How bad a haircut would she get as punishment for stealing Andrée’s thunder? How much would it bug her to keep her gossip to herself? To allow someone else to usurp it?

  She chose being the first to say over placating her hair-cutter. “But I did hear,” she said emphatically and loudly, “there was trouble. Who knows if there would have been a wedding?”

  “What kind of troub—” I began, but Andrée talked over me.

  “Everybody heard, except I wouldn’t have said.” The stylist tightened her lips into a tightly pressed o as she snipped an edge of hair. “Andrée Jansheski doesn’t speak ill of the dead. And Dolores never breathed a word of it herself, so who’s to say if it was so?”

  Trouble. Wedding-preventing trouble. Did that translate into Vincent Devaney?

  “She doesn’t deserve this, the sweet thing. That’s the shame of it,” Stel agreed.

  One law of gossip is to pause and say sympathetic things about those you are about to dismember, thereby demonstrating that you are not biased.

  “Don’t you think she’s a sweetie?” Stel abrupt
ly asked me.

  I nodded. “Sure.” A sweetie isn’t the way I’d instinctively label anyone, but Dolores had seemed a pleasant, self-satisfied, gruff but well-meaning girl. Not that I could remember much that she’d said or done. She’d been mostly a table ornament, frankly. In fact, both the Grassis had been silent observers. It had annoyed me, because theoretically, Stephen was there to help me with information about his club, but instead, he seemed reluctant to give me the time of day. Neither of them was a sweetie.

  “In fact,” Andrée said, “we’re going to see her in a few minutes. That’s why we’re closing the shop. You come, too. Cheer her up. Make a little visit.”

  “Oh, but I—”

  “It’s not far. Girard Estates, you know? Nice house, too.”

  “It’s not that, I—”

  The redheaded operator, who’d been murmuring quietly with her client, joined our conversation. “Look, they can’t even have a wake yet, let alone bury him. The cops, the tests they have to make, you know. Makes it extra hard on her. There’s like no way to end it, no real place or time for people to say how they feel.”

  “A sweet girl,” Andrée said. “A hard worker. So come. Spend an hour, make her feel better.” A big smile this time.

  “I don’t really think I should—”

  “What, you maybe have something more important to do than comfort a friend in mourning?”

  “I would go myself,” Stel said. “If it weren’t for Phyllis.” She sighed loudly, rolled her eyes toward me. “My sister has a condition, depends on me for everything.”

  I murmured in what I hoped was a sympathetic manner. I felt sucked into the vortex of a lot of lives.

  “I went over last night.” This from the pin curl woman as an old-fashioned hairdryer was lowered over her head. The redheaded operator turned on the machine and the pin curl woman continued to talk. Shout, actually. “The family is so upset! What a shame! Her father—I thought he’d have a heart attack!”

  And at that point, they all seemed to abandon the subject of Dolores. The only sound in our little corner was the snipping of Stel’s bad ends.