I said, “Okay, I give up, what other information?”
A paper airplane drifted by.
“Well, I don’t know, but I think you ought to treat me more as a partner and less as an indentured servant if you want information.”
“Don’t push me. What information?”
He couldn’t resist telling.
“Well,” he said, crossing his legs, “the scuttlebutt is that Sammy very much wanted to be Mr. Mitzi.” He watched me through those cat’s eye glasses, waiting for a reaction.
“Mr. Mitzi?”
“Right. He wanted to replace Rudy Wendtz as Numero Uno. He wanted a spot in the Brochu bed. He wanted…”
“I get your drift.”
“So you see what that means.”
I didn’t.
Alvin leaned forward. “Some people say that he was setting up the whole thing. Stringing Brooke along, flirting with her. Finding out her secrets. Making sure Mitzi found out about Brooke and Rudy’s relationship. Letting Mitzi know about Brooke’s problem with her nose. People think that after Mitzi wrote her planned spread about Brooke and her problem, that would have been it for the Mitzi and Rudy show. Brooke’s career would have been ruined. And Sammy would be on the spot to ooze in and comfort poor little Mitzi. And Sammy’s career would prosper as a result.”
“But it doesn’t change anything.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t change anything?”
“Well, we already figured that Rudy Wendtz engineered Mitzi’s death, even if he was elsewhere.”
“So.”
“So, it may give us a bit more on motivation or background, but it doesn’t solve the murder.”
“Who said it did?” He jammed himself into his leather jacket.
He was out the door before I could say anything else.
* * *
I was kicking around my apartment trying to figure out where the rest of the day had gone and why I hadn’t gotten anywhere with the Benning brief and what the stuff Alvin had found out meant, when the doorbell rang.
“You see what happens?” I said to the cats. “You guys lounge around all day on the furniture, and now someone’s here and there’s not one clean spot for them to sit on.”
They ignored me. They’re only interested in conversations about cat food.
“Who is it?” I squawked into the intercom system.
Alexa squawked back at me. By the time she reached my door, I had managed to sweep the black cat off the only armchair and brush most of the hair off the seat.
“God, that woman’s nosy,” she said, pointing at Mrs. Parnell’s apartment and at Mrs. Parnell, who was lurking in her door, propped up by her walker, the ruby tip of her cigarette glowing.
“It’s for my own good,” I said, giving a little wave to Mrs. P. and scooping up a couple of cats before they could shoot into the hallway.
“What is that smell?”
We both sniffed the air.
“You’ve got to change the kitty litter. Every day. With this number of cats, maybe twice a day. Have you been doing that?”
“Sure,” I lied, adding kitty litter to the growing number of things I was behind schedule on.
“Well,” said Alexa, sinking her black-covered bottom onto the part of the sofa where the grey Persian sleeps, “guess what?”
“What?”
“I called him!”
Just in time, I stopped myself from asking who.
“Isn’t that great?” she added. “I never thought I’d have the nerve.”
I decided to be adult about it.
“So, what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there. But that’s not the point. The point is I got up the nerve to call him.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“Of course I didn’t leave a message. You must be kidding.”
“You baffle me.”
“Look, it took enough to get up the courage to call him. I wanted it to look casual.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering what she wanted with me.
She smiled at me. “Let’s have a little drink. I brought Piña Colada mix. I know you have rum.”
A pyjama party, it turned out. A chance for the girls, in this case Alexa and I were the only two available, to lounge around for hours sharing their deepest secrets.
I wasn’t in the mood to share my deepest secrets with anyone, but I didn’t have a problem listening to Alexa’s.
Alexa, it was revealed after three Piña Coladas, had always been in love with Conn McCracken, especially after what happened on the night of their Senior Prom. Conn, it turned out, had never been far from her mind all those years. From time to time, she had been Filled with Regret.
“You hid it well over those twenty-five years of a marriage that everyone thought was happy.”
“I don’t mean my marriage wasn’t happy and that I didn’t love Greg. It’s just I never lost all my feelings for Conn,” she said, before filling me in on Conn’s many, many good points.
“But you haven’t even seen him, for…how long?”
“Gosh, about thirty years. Since I went away to nursing school.”
I wasn’t sure how to break it to her.
“He’s changed. He’s not the football hero anymore. He’s a middle aged man with a paunch.”
“Sounds cute,” she said, draining her drink.
I tried to feed her a few more Piña Coladas in the hope I’d get some specifics about what happened on the night of their Senior Prom, but no luck. At midnight, after a particularly vacuous remark about his noble spirit, she rolled over and began to snore.
I hadn’t said a word about Richard. Somehow, it wasn’t so romantic, having a crush on a man almost old enough to be my father, with a wife who could reappear at any minute. It was stupid and inconvenient and most unlike me.
I was grateful to Alexa who had kept me from thinking about Richard, Mitzi’s murder and how much I had to fear from Denzil the Deadly.
Fourteen
McCracken looked at me calmly. “Alexa’s worried about you poking around in this crime, and she thought I should try to talk some sense into you,” he said.
It was only eleven o’clock. I’d left Alexa in my apartment, hung over and surrounded by hungry cats, to try to catch up on a little work at the office. She must have called McCracken on my own phone.
So that was why he wanted to meet me for coffee and doughnuts. On a Saturday, too. I could feel the steam puffing out of my ears as McCracken kept talking.
He was in a good mood. Maybe it was Alexa’s call. Maybe it was the two jelly doughnuts.
“Apparently your whole family is very concerned about your mental health, since you’re obsessing over Mitzi Brochu’s murder.”
“She said that?”