I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia (23 page)

Her face was a map of hard times and places, and the bright colors of her lids, cheeks, and lips like marks of desperation. She blinked hard and her eyes welled. “I didn’t mean for it to end that way.” Her chest puffed with an enormous inhale, which she held for a long time, then let out with a whoosh. “Not for him to
die.
I only wanted to scare him into doing something. I feel sick with guilt. To cause somebody’s death—
his
death!” She sniffled.

My God—a holistic confession. Like that. And all I had wanted was a factoid, a clue, a hint. I welcomed the diversion of our drinks, delivered to the table by an orange wait-fruit. “So, um, how did you—how did it happen?” Were there really such things as citizen arrests, or was that strictly comic book stuff? Could I convince her to do the right thing and turn herself in? Or physically coerce her to come with me—and, if so, to where? My car was parked down by the river. I imagined dragging the sausage lady behind me up the steps of a bus, and sighed and sank back in my chair.

She breathed shallowly and rapidly and wiped moisture from the corner of her eye. “Who knows exactly how it happened?” she trumpeted. People passing our table stopped and stared, but Fay was oblivious. “Horrible things happen all the time. Like that.” She snapped two long purple nails together, then she fumbled in her purse, a carpetbag, and pulled out a lace-edged handkerchief and sobbed into it.

It was beyond irony to hear a confession of murder here in the citadel of absolute, optimum, permanent physical, mental, and spiritual wellness.

“I wanted him alive, making money,” Fay said. “I wanted to murder him in court!”

I spotted the law across the way and tried for eye contact. He lounged against a zodiac sign, facing us, but although I winked and raised an eyebrow, inviting him over, he managed not to notice.

“Go on,” I answered Fay between grimaces at the man in blue. “You wanted to use the law.” So did I. I jerked my head and winked at the cop one more time.

“Something in your eye?” Fay asked.

I nodded, and blinked some more, rolling my eyes in the direction of the guard, who had X-ray vision, and therefore looked straight through me. I gave it up. “So tell me about last night.” I tried to keep my voice casual.

Fay busied herself straightening the already-in-place neckline of her green ensemble. “I’m a survivor,” she said. “He already near wrecked my life, and that two-faced no-good isn’t pulling me into the grave after him now!”

Now
what was
this? A confession that she wasn’t going to confess, after all? We sat in an awkward silence, then I tried to start her up again. I used the magic word. “Men!” I said.

It worked. She nodded. “Left me with tiny little babies. We’d been the two poorest kids working our way through State, but we had big plans. I was studying education, and I had this idea for centers for kids with learning problems, you know?” Her expression had become dreamy and soft, and the young Fay was almost visible under the overbright pigments. Then she pushed out her chin and hardened up. “Only I never got a degree. I got twins instead.” She considered this for a moment, then nodded. “I have to say, he did the decent thing by me.”

“You mean by marrying you?”

She nodded. “Eloped one night to Jersey. A justice of the peace. Only…he was drunk.”

This was the business that concerned the twins, a possible problem with the marriage’s validity. “Lots of grooms are drunk from what I hear,” I said.

“The justice of the peace was drunk, too. And I had morning sickness at night. I don’t know if anybody ever sent in whatever you’re supposed to.” She sighed. “But we were married. Wynn had a job by then. Teaching high school. I thought we were happy. But one morning during spring break, there’s a twenty-dollar bill and a note that says
I’ll call.
Which he didn’t. Didn’t come back to his job, either. Wrote letters instead. In Ohio, he said he was testing my idea, and that he’d send for us. From New York, he said it was
economically unfeasible.
He was bankrupt, depressed, desperate. I believed him.

“That postcard ended with
Sorry
, and it was the last I ever heard. I thought he’d killed himself. All these years, I figure I’m a widow, then I come to this conference and find out he’s famous, making big bucks from my idea! Plus, he’s a bigamist.” She sat back and folded her arms over her puffy breast.

“Jeez, girl, what happened to you? I thought you were kidnapped.” Sasha towered over us, a fleshy escapee from a Shakespearean spoof in her tunic and high boots. “Expected to find your picture on soy milk cans from now on.”

“Sasha Berg, Fay Elias.” Both women nodded at each other with no interest. “Didn’t mean to mess up your picture,” I said, “but I was so excited to see Fay that—”

Just then, Mr. Sighs and Whispers loped over, a shank of straight blond hair carefully draped over his right eye. “You ready, Sasha?” he asked with a disappointing twang. Maybe he was from Midwest Sweden.

Sasha saw something that intrigued her and turned, with her camera up to her eye, and Lars did a stupid double-take in my direction. “Well, well,” he said, “and who is this?” I wonder why men think it’s cute to talk that way. “Why weren’t we introduced? I’m Lars Feldman. I’m an actor.” He pulled out a wrought-iron chair and looked ready to settle down at our table. “And you, pretty lady, are…?”

“Sasha’s best friend,” I said. “I think she needs one.”

“No offense,” Fay said when Lars and Sasha meandered off, “but where does your friend find her clothes?”

“The same secondhand sources she finds her men.” Although Fay, who looked like a fluorescent hot dog, had no right to be a fashion Nazi.

She stuck her index finger through a curl and twirled it while her gaze became distant. Then she put down her hand and shook her head. “Listen, the past is the past. The present is all that matters. I am his widow. Mother of his babies.”

“But about what you said. The…guilt, you know? About his death? That makes a difference.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to be tactless, but frankly, it doesn’t matter if he was a bigamist or not. Given the, um, situation, what you did, you can’t inherit from him. Now, as for Adam and Eve—”

“What’re you talking about?” Her eyes rounded, her mouth made a small scarlet O. “Wait a—you’re saying
I
killed my own husband
?”

That summoned a crowd, even a lady with a placard about chakra cleansing. I leaned close and whispered. “You said so! How guilty you felt about causing his death—you just said so!”

She put a purple-tipped hand to her bosom. “My heart,” she shrieked. “I can’t believe!”

The man in blue, the one I’d been vainly trying to entice, miraculously recovered from his coma and scuttled over. “You all right, miss?” he asked her.

His badge named a security firm, not the police. I had wasted a lot of eye-batting.

“My heart’s going a mile a minute. Whoof!” Fay fanned herself.

The guard looked confused.

“That woman said—” Fay began.

The guard looked annoyed.

“I can’t even repeat such things! If you knew what she said!”

“Your heart’s all right, then?” he asked.

Fay shook herself back in place and looked up at him coquettishly. “She shocked me,” she said.

His face wrinkled in a queasy grin that said “Women!” and he backed off warily.

“Then what on earth was all that guilty talk about?” I asked.

She looked solemn and near tears again. “I didn’t want him to die, and I’m responsible.”

“Look, Fay, this is where I came in.” Maybe this was where I should get out. Join the recovery group for Women Who Sleuth Too Much.

“Wynn did me wrong, and that I don’t forgive, but I never wished him
dead.
”
She looked appalled that the word had come out of her. “But I caused it all the same.”

Her head drooped, her skin sagged, and I had no idea where we were or what was going on.

“Lydia is innocent, like you said. She pulled the trigger, but I was the one drove her crazy, appearing out of the blue, announcing she wasn’t his real wife. I read in the newspaper that she has a history of not being screwed on too tight. I didn’t know, I swear. I shamed her, drove her to it.”

“No, no,” I said. “Lydia did not pull that trigger.”

Fay raised her penciled eyebrows. “Don’t be ridiculous. I have reason to know she was very upset last night. Crazy, all right?”

“I know two of your reasons,” I said. “They accosted me today.”

“My children were there for legitimate purposes. There are millions at stake. Their rightful inheritance.”

“Don’t count on it.” From what I’d heard, the business sounded as unstable as it was unethical, skimming profits, probably hiding them.

Fay recoiled a bit. “Millions,” she insisted. “Although that’s of no real importance to me. I’m more spiritual than the twins.” She lowered her eyes and looked meditative, or perhaps a little disappointed in what she’d bred. Then her head popped back up and she eyed me sharply, belatedly realizing the implications of what she’d said. “Now don’t you
dare
for one minute think my babies did anything like that!”

She and her enormous babies were getting on my nerves. I risked another fainting fit with a direct question. “You didn’t happen to be out there with them last night, did you?”

She clutched her carpetbag in both hands. “There you go again!”

“All the same, where were you?”

“I was otherwise engaged…by…in a workshop.”

I opened my program. “Come on, Fay, there isn’t a single nighttime workshop.”

“Well, it was a—a different kind. Not scheduled. And—none of your business!” Her cheeks flamed until they matched her hair.

I wondered who he’d been. The Breatharian? One of the carrots? Or had the roll in the tofu really been a trip to the Tellers’? Those fool twins needed guidance to do almost anything.

“The point is,” Fay said, gathering up her carpetbag, “Lydia was pretty nuts last night. Crying and carrying on about her child being pushed out and my children pushing in. Made no sense.”

“The twins told you all this?”

“How else would I know it? We were the final straw for crazy
Lydia Teller, and she went over the edge. I’ll die feeling guilty.”

And with enough bad luck, I won’t solve this and I’ll just die. Now, I trusted no one. Lydia had lied, too, saying she’d been locked in a bathroom all night and had no knowledge of visitors. But the twins, or Fay, placed her there with them, engaging in a very visible tantrum. Lydia had lied. There was no way around it.

“He threw out my letters.” Fay’s face sagged with a heavy wistfulness. “He’s a pack rat, but he didn’t keep souvenirs of us. No reminders of who he’d been. I mean he
wanted
me, if you catch my meaning, but not as a wife. I was an accidental wife to him.” She looked newly sad about it. “He always wanted class. Talked about it as far back as I can remember, when he was no more than a boy. He was going to be somebody special and marry somebody just as special. Like Lydia with her famous parents, like the article said.”

She straightened up as tall as her small torso could manage. “And look where it got him. Or her, for that matter. He left a perfectly good woman and adorable babies so he could wind up with a no-good son and a classy wife who shoots him dead. Serves him right.”

She seemed oblivious to the tears running down her face. Her eyeliner softened into a dark smudge, and her powder showed damp tracks.

“He pushed me around, too,” she said, “like the news said he did to her. But he should have known. You can’t dump on a class act the way you can on me. Well, she showed him, didn’t she?”

Nineteen

“ABOUT YOUR STAYING OVER TONIGHT…” SASHA SAID.

Lars did not look like the path to clean living, but even so, for him, Sasha would risk my life, or simply forget about it for a few hours. “No problem,” I lied.

“Will you be safe?” she belatedly asked.

“Sure. Definitely. Don’t think about it.” I did think about it, however, and decided that if the hearthside seemed too creepy, Macavity and I would check into a hotel. “But Sash,” I said with a nod toward Lars, “I’m not sure you’re safe. He’s variation nine million, twelve thousand and eight.”

She’d eventually remember her tally of rotten male types, but only after Lars had been added to the list of Mr. Wrongs. Where men are concerned, Sasha’s learning curve is flat. Maybe that’s true of all of us—breathes there a woman who listens to antiromantic killjoys?

I wondered if anybody had tried to warn Lydia Teller. I wondered if anybody besides Fay had even suspected who lived inside Wynn’s charming exterior.

The winter night was an icy contrast to the bustling, light-filled heralds of the New Age I’d just left. On the bus, en route to my car, I talked to myself, insisting there was a logic to Wynn Teller’s murder and that I would find it, and in so doing preserve the space between my shoulders and my chin. People stayed away from me as I mumbled.

I drove slowly toward my parking lot. But my self-assurances that I was smart and brave enough to handle this thing weren’t enough to quell rising panic. I decided to check out my street surrounded by auto rather than only disintegrating, vulnerable down. If the gray narc car was even in the same zip code as mine, I wouldn’t so much as slow down. Better to let Macavity diet a while longer than orphan him.

My home is on an alley with an attitude, bordered like a capital
I
with numbered streets. I approached it slowly, and slammed on my brakes at its entrance, causing traffic hysteria which I could only hope would drive the intruder away. Because there it was, a car illegally stopped mid-block. I couldn’t tell its color at this hour and from this distance, but I could tell it was parked at Ground Zero, my front door.

My pulse pole vaulted above my target training zone into the seriously anaerobic—there was no longer any air in the car or my lungs.

The smell of gunpowder had decimated me. Just the sight of a car from which somebody had tried to kill me was too much to bear.